Those Who Walk in Darkness

Nightshift was the first. He showed up and overnight the world changed. I was young then. Younger. And all I cared about were rock bands and movie stars, and didn't give much thought to the significance of things like his arrival. Except that it was cool, he was cool. In time, that, like everything else, would change too.

In the first weeks after he hit the scene the papers and news shows were fat with rumors and half-truths and speculations by experts.

Experts?

How were there going to be any experts when there'd never been anything like him, it, before?

It was his physiology, they said. It suggested that he may not be of this… They said he was the by-product of government experiments which caused his body to become… Mental superiority allowed him to project an aura which resulted in…

On and on. All that anybody really knew was somewhere in San Francisco, night after night, he… it. It was out there. Stopping a bank robbery, a gang drive-by, keeping a kid from getting flattened by a runaway truck… whatever.

And then, just as quick as he appeared, Nightshift got mundane. Oh, he kept a jewelry store from getting ripped off again? Another car jacking busted up? Well, sure, I mean it's good, but…

I got used to it. I got used to them. We all did. And we all went back to being concerned with other things… rock bands and movie stars.

Like I said: That would change.

San Francisco. The dead. The EO that made them all outlaws.

We blame them. They deserve blame. But maybe it's our fault too. We never should've let them do our job for us. We never should've relied on them. We never should've slept while they stood guard; spectators at the foot of ML Olympus.

No.

Hell no. What happened was their fault and theirs alone. And for what they did they're all going to pay the price.

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

Jesus Christ.

It was the thought pumping through Soledad's head. A phrase. A prayer. Something to chant over and over to keep her mind off what was coming.

What was coming was what she'd spent her whole life working toward. Her whole life: only twenty-six years, nine months. But most of that was spent at Northwestern studying, at the police academy and on the force training, working her way from beat cop through SPU up to MTac—prepping for this moment: her first call.

Jesus. F'n. Christ.

The others in the APC, the others riding with Soledad, they looked calm. Serene, kind of. Mostly they didn't look like cops racing through LA traffic, lights and sirens at full tilt. Except for their weapons and body armor—none of it worn to regulation. Bo and Soledad the only two who bothered with Fritz helmets, and Soledad was pretty sure Bo sported his just so she wouldn't come off like the only weak sister in the bunch—they looked like people out for a Sunday drive. Not one of them seemed to carry the thought odds were, end of the night, all of them would be dead. Maybe that was the key, Soledad considered, to getting through this: don't think, just do.

Soledad adjusted the strap of her breastplate where it cut into the flesh of her underarm. Probably designed by a man, it didn't particularly fit a woman.

"Don't bother." It was Yarborough—Yar—playing cocky, giving Soledad shit for concerning herself with things like body armor, things that might keep her alive. His bravado was his tender. He spent it easy: a lazy grin, a wink tossed for no reason. He spent it heavy in the body armor he didn't wear, same as if he were among the rare breed too cool to die. "Might as well take that shit off. Doesn't do any good."

Soledad looked to Reese. Didn't mean to. Had told herself no matter what, especially this first call, never in a moment of doubt look to Reese. Soledad thought it was a sign of weakness, like looking to your mom when the corner bully went calling you names. But the action was reflexive. Reese was the only other woman on the element, one of the few female MTacs. So Soledad looked to her, as if femininity equated fidelity.

Reese, deep in her own thoughts, just stared straight ahead paying no attention to Soledad or anyone else.

Bo, jumping into things: "Leave her." His voice had a drawl. Slight. Cowpoke slow. Soledad had seen Bo with a gun on the target range. His drawl was the only thing slow about him. "We're supposed to be wearing it."

"You're not wearing your armor," Yar tossed back.

The APC juked hard to one side to avoid a Toyota that cut across an intersection never-minding the lights and sirens of the MTac vehicle. Typical LA. Didn't matter what the emergency was, everybody thinks they've got someplace to be.

"I did first call. First call I would've driven a tank if I could've."

Yar laughed. Not like what Bo had said was funny, like what Bo had said was plain ridiculous; as if a tank would make any difference in the world when you were facing down a freak. Bo was senior lead officer of the element, the oldest. Soledad thought: hell of a career choice she'd made where forty was considered a long-timer. The same thought jerked her hand to the case resting next to her thigh.

"Whatcha got?" Yarborough asked, using his chin to point at the case. It was small, hardcover-book-sized, zippered, made from synthetics.

Soledad wondered to herself why Yar was paying her so much attention. She hadn't been on Central long, but they'd all trained together, put in hours together. All that time Yar hardly looked in her direction. Here they were rolling on an M-norm, and all he could do was razz her every couple of—

"Whatcha got in the case? Bring a couple of books so you won't get bored?"

The APC stopped. Not even. It slowed some, but that was signal enough: time to move. Bo was first out, the door barely open. Yar-borough, Reese just a step behind. Soledad, affixing the case to her back, was right with them hesitating not a second, not any amount of time anyone could say she froze, she was scared, she wasn't ready. Even if she was all that, no way she'd let anyone think it.

As she moved, Soledad's eyes worked the scene, took in information and processed it on the fly. Downtown LA. Rail yards. A warehouse, boarded windows showing fire. Police cordoning off the area, keeping a good distance back.

A safe distance.

Inside the perimeter: a couple of burned-out fire trucks and squads, the reek of their molten metal, plastic and fabric strong enough to choke on deep breaths.

Outside the perimeter: Lookie-lous gathered. The good citizens of Los Angeles. They stared. They pointed. A couple had camcorders ready to do some taping, hoping a cop got offed in some spectacular manner so they could sell the footage to CNN.

Bo wove his way to the officer in charge. Soledad got the name on the sergeant's badge: Yost.

Bo, direct: "Whatcha got?"

"Pyrokinetic." Yost was sweaty from more than the heat of the fires. He was wet with fear.

Soledad felt herself starting to share the dampness.

"Firestarter?" Bo's eyes swept the warehouse.

Yarborough swept it with IR goggles.

"If it was a firestarter, you think any of us would still be here?" Yost answered. "Flamethrower, but it can toss 'em about thirty or forty feet. That's what happened to the vehicles."

Reese worked the action of her piece. It was like she wasn't even listening to the back-and-forth between Bo and Yost. It was like all she cared about was putting a bullet in something.

Yost: "The freak won't let the bucket boys put out the fire."

Yarborough kept moving his goggles across the warehouse.

"Probably started it just to get them down here, work up a body count. Fucking freak."

"That's good," Bo said. "Keep calling it names. That'll get us home early."

Yost mumbled something audible about MTacs being arrogant motherfu—

Yarborough: "Got him. Third floor, southeast corner."

"One?" Reese asked.

"That's all I'm reading. Hard to be sure with the fire."

"Thank God it ain't one of those mind readers." Yost was getting sweatier by the second.

Soledad: "Maybe it is." She hoped she sounded like she was just voicing a consideration and not bitch scared.

"Couldn't pay me to go in there, I'll tell you that." Yost said it, then said it again. "You couldn't pay me nothing to go in there."

Bo said: "Throw some light up top, make a little noise for cover. You'd take pay for that, right?" To his element: "Mike check. One."

"Two."

"Three."

Soledad: "Four."

Bo started to move, started for the warehouse. Soledad was ready to move with him. Something on her arm. Fear made every sensation feel like fire, like maybe she'd caught a little of what slagged those vehicles. A quick look: Reese giving a squeeze; reassuring. Saying stay close without saying a word.

Soledad eyed Reese's shoulder, her tattoo; the words etched there. Tough words. Downright BAMF words that told it like it was, like it should be. Soledad kept close to Reese as the four went for the warehouse.

As they did, behind them, Yost managed to get his act together enough to put spotlights on the building. Third floor.

Bo had point. He carried a Colt. 45 government model: more stopping power than the 9mms beat cops carried. A precision kill weapon. Reese and Yarborough toted HK MP5s, excellent for chopping freaks. Light, fast, and at full auto it could spray, baby, spray. Soledad had the Benelli, a semiauto shotgun loaded with one-ounce slugs. She was the fail-safe. If nothing else could stop what they were going after, the Benelli could put a hole in anything. Usually. All the weapons were Synthtech series, manufactured—like everything else they carried and wore—from synthetics and composite materials.

Inside.

The first thing they got hit with was the smell, the odor of perpetually burning flesh. And something else. The hint of another aroma that Soledad could just barely distinguish. The stink of smoked crack.

Oh, that's good, she thought. Not just a flamethrower. A hopped-up flamethrower. And this was her first call.

Stairway. Narrow. Not a good place to get caught. All four MTacs could go up like kindling. But it was the only approach.

Up the stairs.

First landing… nothing.

Second landing… more nothing, except the smells were strong and there was a voice. Strange, distorted like it was trying to make itself heard through the roar of a blast furnace.

All four MTacs had their weapons gripped hard and ready to do work. All four did a crab walk, step by step, inching upward for the third floor.

Bo's voice whispered into their earpieces: "Hold."

The air was hotter, thinner, some of its O2 gone. The thing was burning it off. Her uniform was suffocating her. All that, anxiety; they didn't help Soledad's breathing any. Her chest rose and fell in a rapid pace. Her hand pushed sweat off her forehead. It was rolling from her now. Rolling in sheets. Chestplate crushing her. Felt like it was. Should've listened to Yar; ditched the body armor. Should've…

Jesus Christ.

In her mind her own voice repeating: This is it this is it this is it. Stay cool. This is it this is it…

More of the blast furnace rant. Clearer now.

"Muthafuckas! Ya want sum? Huh? C'mon, bitches! Come taste summa dis!"

All Soledad could think was that he… it sounded like a crazy waving a Saturday night special around a liquor store. Everything they can do, all their abilities, but get down to it, end of the day, they're just street punks. Nothing more. Nothing better.

Bo peeked up to the third floor. A lot of space broken up by vertical supports.

In Soledad's earpiece, Bo clipped and to the point: "Sixty feet. Back to us. Me, Yarborough left. Reese, Soledad right."

That was all the more instruction they got. All they needed. Bo moved out low and quick with Yarborough right behind him. Reese and Soledad moved opposite, Soledad's heart slamming away inside her chest. They eased across the floor using the vertical supports, thankfully many of them, for cover.

The smells were thicker: the never-ending stench of roasting carcass swallowed with every breath to form a nauseating mixture in the stomach.

From hiding, Soledad peeked around a vertical. She could see the freak engulfed in its own flames. She had never seen one this close—a pyrokinetic or any other kind of M-norm. Its body shimmered with heat and fire but refused to burn itself. The flames just crackled and danced continually, feeding on the flesh of its host: an endless human wick.

This is it this is it this…

Soledad couldn't take deep breaths, couldn't get her breathing to slow down.

"Muthafuckas!" it screamed at the cops down on the street. "Think you got sumthin'? Bitches, come up here an' show me sumthin'!" It thrust its arm out a window. It shot a tendril of flame, the fire howling as it scorched the air it rode on.

Outside, three stories down, Soledad heard the wail of men. Maybe burning. Maybe dying.

"Muthafuckas! Better recognize!"

Bo, in the earpieces: "Ready?"

Down the line:

"Ready."

"Ready."

This is…"Ready."

Bo twisted from behind the vertical.

Soledad's heart clutched, then double-pumped.

Bo spoke, yelled with pure authority. "This is the police! You are in violation of an Executive Ord—"

That was all Bo got out, all the thing would let him get out before it turned from the window and sent a finger of flame burning in Bo's direction.

Bo sprang back, tumbled. Moved on instinct. Thought would've taken too long. Thought would've left him standing where fire now cooked the floor. He would have been dead.

"Bitches come ta play?" the pyro shrieked over the crackle of the burning wood. The thing shot fire again. From its skin, from its flesh, from itself it generated fire.

Instinct wasn't fast enough. Not this time. This time Bo got sent sailing, ridden into the dark of the warehouse along a river of flame. "Show me sumthin', bitch! Whatcha got ta show me?"

Yarborough, Reese and Soledad up and out and shooting. A continual chant of 9 mm fire interrupted by the low boom of Soledad's shells.

Why didn't, she wondered as her finger jerked the trigger, they just do this first off? You got a thing that can spit fire from its body, fuck warnings and police procedure. Kill 'em! They all deserved to die anywa—

Bullets no good. Lead turned to slag from the aura of heat around the freak before the shells could even touch it.

"What da fuck?" the thing snapped. "Was you 'bout ta shoot my ass?" A hand arched before it. Just like that, empty space burned hot. A wave of flame ran for Yarborough, Reese and Soledad in a violent ripple.

Soledad moved, tried to dodge the flames. Too slow. They picked her up, kicked her back. They slammed her down hard on the wood floor. She had sense enough to roll with the landing. Kept her from getting hurt. Badly hurt. The bits of pain that came with lightly singed flesh let her know she'd survived the assault.

She came up looking around: Yarborough down. Leg engulfed. He rolled, snuffed it out. He didn't scream. Bad as the burn was, bad as it looked even at a distance, he didn't scream.

Reese was clear. At least, Soledad didn't see her. So she was clear. Maybe. Maybe Reese'd just been turned to ash and there was nothing of her left to see.

The thing, the monster, stepped up, stretched a hand for Yarborough.

Soledad: "Yar!" She took aim. Fired. The shells, useless as ever, turning to molten lead as they sped for the burning man.

The thing's arm twisted away from Yar, gave its full attention to Soledad. Through the heat-distorted air, on the creature's face, Soledad could make out a jacked smile. It was there for just a second before being washed away by the flames the thing sent for her.

"How's dis, bitch? I'ma 'bout ta break me off my burnin' foot in yo ass!"

Soledad turned and curled and took the flames like a fist to the back. They batted her against a vertical, forcing the air from her body. Good thing. A breath in, and she would have sucked fire; she would have fried herself from the inside out. Bad as the hit hurt, it saved her life.

Vision blurred, head throbbing. Soledad sank to the floor, couldn't help herself from going down. She tried to lift herself, then sank again. Pain was the motivator to stay where she was. Brilliant pain. Arm burning. The Nomex uniforms were fire-retardant, not fireproof, and not fire-anything against muties. She slapped the flames dead, then stared at charred fabric. Except it wasn't charred fabric. It was burned flesh beginning to boil and blister.

Soledad felt like she was swimming: light, buoyant, moving through a viscid fluid. She felt all that, and her burnt arm felt cool.

Shock. Coming on fast.

Soledad's empty hand groped for the Benelli but stayed empty.

Yarborough, still down. Still immobile.

Where was Bo? Where was Reese?

Soledad managed to get her head up. Coming toward her through dutch-angled vision was the thing. The floor sizzled where it stepped.

Soledad's long-standing fear, her cop nightmare: to be incapacitated by a perp, unable to run, unable to hide… a weapon touching-close but too far away to be of any use, she'd be unable to do anything but lie and watch Death take a stroll for her. It was a weak and helpless and frightening scenario, and she was staring right at it.

"What's da matter, ya bitchass skeez?" Slow burn to its voice. All of it burned slow. "Ain't got nothin' more ta show me?"

A hard struggle got Soledad nowhere near up to her feet.

"I'll show ya, sumthin'. Ya wanna see sum shit?"

The thing stopped moving. It stood over Yarborough. Its hand glowed, gathering heat and flame, ready to send it pouring over the cop. Ready to kill him.

"Too easy!" Soledad screaming, swooning with disorientation. "Kill a guy who can't fight?" Felt like she wanted to fall. Still on the floor, and she felt like… "You're the goddamn bitch, you two-dollar whore!" Burned, weaponless, weak; big talk, that's all she had.

Nothing. For a second, nothing.

Then the glow from the thing's hand spread over his body. He went hot with excitement as much as fire.

"Skeez got sumthin' after all. I'm gonna light you up. I'm gonna light up yo pussy!"

The man of fire stalked for Soledad, but took its time about it, each step prolonged for its max pleasure: the anticipation of the kill. Foreplay, then death.

Soledad felt the thing approaching, felt the heat of it pressing toward her more than she could see it. One eye was swelling shut, the other collecting the blood that ran from her head. A weak arm feebled for her back, for the pack she had attached there. Didn't have the strength to pull it free.

"How you want it, girl? Which hole you want it in?"

The heat, oppressive, burning oxygen and passing Soledad out. At least, she thought, she wouldn't be conscious for her own end. Through a curtain of blood she saw the thing's fiery hand reaching for her. It was an unnatural wonder. It was the last thing she'd ever see.

Blue, moving fast. Reese, throwing herself at the mutie, knocking it from Soledad's path.

Soledad rolled, scrambled for the cover of one of the verticals. The stay of execution injecting her with enough fight to keep alive.

Reese, on the floor; wounded animal sounds. The side of her body she'd slammed against the thing was black with burns.

Reese down. Yar down. Bo gone.

Time. It was only a matter of how much—a minute, a few seconds—before that thing killed them all.

Hand alive with desperation, Soledad pulled the pack from her back, worked the zipper. Inside: a gun.

The freak, only dazed by the open-field tackle, got its bearings, moved for Reese. "Bitch, I wasn't tryin' ta fuck wit you. Ain't nobody told you ta come in here an' git wit my shit. You better axe sumbody!"

No hesitation this time. The thing's hand to the chestplate of

Reese's body armor. A second later: a horrible sizzle, the smell of burnt meat.

From Reese, screams. Spastic jerking and twitching against the pain, and screams.

Shaky hands, Soledad fumbled for the clips in the pack. Which color, her mind unable to lock thoughts. Which color? Which— Red, the red clip. Grabbed it, she slid it into the back of the gun.

One deep breath.

Soledad stood, came into the open.

The thing rose to meet her.

Reese's body kept flopping around over the wood.

"Oh, now bitch wants sumthin'. You gonna play me like dat wit yo little bitchass gat. Let's get it on, girl. Bring it da fuck on!"

Yeah. Let's bring it on.

Soledad took aim with her piece. The DTT raced up, then locked.

The thing burned bright, ready to spatter fire. Ready to kill.

How do you shoot something like that? How do you use a bullet against a thing that can melt lead?

Soledad squeezed the trigger. No hammer fell. Just the same, her weapon spat. The slugs—four fired in instantaneous succession— touched air, then went white hot. They stayed white-hot as they cut through the freak's flames, hit it in the chest, tore it open. They were white-hot as they ripped and shredded flesh and muscle, broke bone and turned it into shrapnel, wounding from the inside outward. The slugs were just as hot when they opened four jagged defects in the freak's back and kept on going.

Phosphorous bullets. Soledad had answered a question with a question: How do you melt what's already on fire?

The thing stood unbelieving. Blood, like streams of lava, leaking from the tunnels Soledad had laced through its chest. It stood for a moment… stood… its light and fire dimmed. Then the thing went down felled-timber hard.

Quiet.

Soledad limped for the body, not having known until that moment she'd done damage to her leg. The pain of a twisted knee subordinate to that of smoldering flesh.

Step, drag. Step, drag.

Soledad stood over the pyro. She venom-dripped words down at its empty eyes. "Who's the bitch now? You bleed. Fucked-up-looking and hot, but you bleed."

Eulogy over.

Soledad turned for Reese. Reese's body. In the center of her chest, where her armor was melted away, was a burned-out crater. Cooked meat hanging off the bone.

"God…" Soledad lowered herself, repulsed by Reese's wound but unable to look away from it. Her hand out toward it to… to what? To touch it? Tend to it? What was the point? Nothing she could do. Not one—

A gurgle. A spasm from the body.

Soledad sprang back.

Reese in a death prattle… and then something else. A breath. Short, shallow, but a breath.

"Ten-thirty-three!" Soledad yelled, not knowing she was yelling. Not even sure if there was anyone to hear her. "Officer down! I need a rush on a bus at this loca—"

Real quick her words got choked out. Her throat was on fire. A painful jerk of her head to the side, through the corner of her eye: It was alive; the thing, the human flame. Alive just enough to ignite its hand, take Soledad by the neck and sear her skin.

"… Youse sumthin', girl. " Slurred words of the dying, but dying slow enough to drag Soledad with it. "Truth: youse the only bitch man enough ta be wit all da shit. Truth. It's da truth dat sets ya free, an' revelation is comin'. Come here, bitch, an' kiss me good-bye."

The thing worked up half a smile and got ready to end Soledad's life—choke it from her, squeeze it, burn it from her. One way or the other, kill her.

Three loud pops. Three large holes bust open in the thing's body just before it tipped and thudded against the floor.

Hand to her throat. Soledad could feel the dead flesh peel beneath her touch.

Across the warehouse: Bo, blood leaking from his skull, held his smoking .45.

Soledad saw that, then promptly passed out.

Expense equaling excellence, Cedars-Sinai was the best hospital in the world. Parked on prime real estate in Beverly Hills, Spielberg had a wing there. So did Max Factor, the long-gone Hollywood cosmetics king. Cedars-Sinai is where the rich went for plastic surgery, movie stars went to die and MTacs got sent to recuperate. Usually MTacs didn't get to die in a hospital. Usually MTacs died on the spot courtesy of some kind of superpowered metanormal.

Soledad woke up floating above her hospital bed. Above her body. Felt like she was. The sensation coming from the painkillers that doped her up. From her vantage point, looking down at herself—her black skin counterpoint to the white sheets and gown she was wrapped in—Soledad's physical self looked like it needed all the painkillers the docs could legally feed her. Her neck was wrapped with gauze and netting. Same with her left arm. A brace on her right leg. Bruises, cuts, welts all over.

But she was alive.

Were the rest of them?

Bo, yeah. And Yarborough, probably. He got jacked up, bad, but he must've made it.

Reese?

Reese was alive. Had to be alive. It'd take more than a crack-high freak to put Reese down.

Then Soledad remembered the smoldering cavity the freak had burned into Reese's chest and wasn't so sure of things.

And that had been Soledad's first call. Four cops injured, one critically.

And the screams: the screams that came when the thing shot flame to the street below the warehouse. Had those cops lived or fried?

All that pain and suffering and death just to bring down one of them. One out of how many who lived hidden in the city? In the country?

But they had put it down. They, she, had chopped it cold. Except for being badly burned and getting her leg messed up and almost having the life choked and smoked out of her, Soledad had stopped it. Well… she had slowed it some until Bo could kill it.

Still, not bad. First call and all. This was a…

Soledad had started to think to herself that this was a learning experience; there'd be time to pick skills up and get things right. From her corner of the ceiling she looked down at her broken self. A busted, charred body is what using reality for a classroom had gotten her.

The door.

Bo came in. Flowers in hand, plastic-wrapped. Picked up, probably, from Ralphs or Sav-On. Bandage on his head.

From way up high Soledad saw herself turn, try to focus. Bo looked… he looked downright quaint. The good cop visiting the wounded partner. He looked healthy too. Broad in shoulder and barrel-chested. His hair was prematurely white and just under it, where his hairline met his forehead, was the bandage that covered some stitches. Other than that you wouldn't much know he'd just gone up against a pyrokinetic. He was a helluva cop, one Soledad wished she could be.

Flowers on the nightstand. Bo pulled up a chair and sat himself down.

"Well, now," drawl in full effect,"how you doing?" he asked. Then, quickly: "No, don't try and say anything. Doctor said your throat would be fu— messed up for some."

Soledad smiled. Her physical body smiled. It was cute to her: Bo, the BAMF cop she'd almost died with, worried about his language around her. She wanted to tell him it was cool to talk free, but the thought of speaking was enough to send a phantom of pain howling through her throat.

"But nothing too bad," Bo went on. "They said you'd heal up pretty good. Your leg too. Maybe just some… a little scarring. On your neck, I mean. Your neck and arm. Just a little."

Soledad found herself trying to lift her hand to her neck, feel the wound. She was too hopped-up to get her limb off the bed.

"Yar? He's okay." Bo dialogued with himself. "Don't think he's going to ever wear shorts at the beach again, but…"

The hint of a laugh escaped from Soledad. The hurt that came with it was monumental.

Bo caught her wincing. "Sorry. Shouldn't be making jokes."

The pain passed. Soledad knew what Bo was building to, and with sheer force of will silently asked the question. Reese?

"She's still alive," Bo answered. "You can call it that. She's got… there's… it's a hole. That thing put a goddamn hole in her chest. Had to… they, uh, had to take out one of her lungs."

Bo's voice cracked. He had to tilt back his head to keep water from filling his eyes. Something about that; something so painful about a cop, a tough cop, breaking down over one of their own… For Soledad it hurt just to watch.

"That mutie, its hand was so hot it cauterized the wound. Only thing that saved her. Even at that, a little to the left, an inch, and it would have cooked her heart."

Yeah, but the thing's hand wasn't that inch to the left. Reese was alive.

A version of it.

Virtually alive.

Soledad wanted to tell Bo that everything would be cool, that Reese would make it through okay. Maybe with just one lung, and a big fat divot where her sternum used to be, but she would make it. And then, after a long while 'cause everybody had a lot of recovering to do, he and Reese and Yar and herself would all be back together: an element again. Even though they'd only been on one call together—one that had nearly gotten them all dead—they'd be back together and better than ever. Except for the burns on Yar's body, and Bo's cracked skull and Soledad's seared flesh and Reese's missing lung, better than ever.

Soledad wanted to tell Bo all that, but her broiled throat turned her reassuring words into a sickly gurgle that meant nothing.

"She's in a coma," Bo continued, not having been able to decipher Soledad's new language. "Good thing, I guess. She can't feel anything that way. Thirty-three, you know that? Reese was thirty-three." Something in his voice. A quiver. He was breaking again."You don't think how young that is until someone dies at that age."

But she wasn't dead, Soledad thought. Thought hard, trying to make Bo hear her. Reese wasn't dead, so why would he say something as foolish as that when he knew she wasn't—

"You did a job out there." Bo looked back to Soledad. He worked up a smile, forced some dull light behind his eyes."For a probee, and against a pyro? You were really something. Really…"

Bo hesitated. A second. Hardly that. Time enough for Soledad to know what was coming wasn't good.

Bo said: "There's going to be trouble. About the gun. The one you used. I shouldn't be going on about that now. You've got other concerns. I don't want you to worry, but you should know. I think… I'm pretty sure there's going to be trouble, and you should at least know."

Soledad wasn't sure what to say to that. Couldn't say anything if she did know how to respond. So she did nothing, didn't want to do anything. The drugs that killed her pain dulled her ability to care about possible future troubles she might have. She just wanted to float. Floating was fine.

For a while longer, a good while, Bo sat with Soledad. Saying nothing. Just sitting. Just being there for her. After he'd sat for what seemed like a good amount of time, he got up and patted Soledad twice on the shoulder and left.

Soledad kept on floating over her body. She thought—or at least all the dope working in her made her think—as long as she had freedom from solid form, she should float to Reese's room, see how she was doing.

And maybe Reese was having a fake out-of-body experience too. Maybe the both of them could float and talk, get to know each other like they'd never previously done, or maybe take a sail around the hospital, because how many times in life do you get to fly?

So Soledad did that; tried to float to Reese.

She couldn't.

She went to sleep instead.

Reese made for a queer sight. Lying on her hospital bed, she looked tranquil; face placid. Body relaxed. The angel at rest.

In high contrast were blood-soaked bandages that covered her ugly red/black wounds, tubes and catheters and wires that ran from orifice to sustaining contraption—commingled in a complex matrix until it was pretty much impossible to tell where humanity ended and appliance began. If the devices sustained the body, or if the body justified the devices' existence.

And with the hybrid biomechanical form came the sounds of life: the slurping of the pumps and the suction of the tubes that replaced the inhale/exhale of lungs and the quiet, regular beat of a human heart. The beeps and clicks of monitors as they read cardio rate and pulse and respiration and alpha waves and tabulated their minute variances over a period of time, then printed this information so that the well-trained, highly skilled, overly expensive C-S medical staff could analyze the data and pronounce their prognosis: no change. The patient was, still, not dead, not alive.

All that science, all those electronics and gears and dials just to maintain the approximation of life.

Nearly two weeks. Ten days it'd taken Soledad to nerve herself for the event of crutching it from her room, down the hospital corridor to the elevator to the ICU to where what remained of Reese was kept. Ten days, not counting the five Soledad had no choice but to sit in her room, recovering, with nothing more to do than prepare for visiting Reese.

Yarborough she'd seen already. Visiting Yarborough had been easy. Even banged up and in the hospital, Yar was in good spirits.

Not that he'd been looking to get himself all fried, but he didn't much seem to care. Yarborough was the original BAMF. An MTac with an exponent. He didn't do what he did so much because he believed in the cause; because he wanted to protect and defend ordinary humans from the hegemony of the muties. He did what he did because how many times in life do you get to serve warrants on people who can throw flames from their bodies or make metal come alive? Not enough where Yarborough was concerned. Not hardly. It was like he was bred for the job. Five-ten, just over one-sixty, Yar was trim and light and moved fast, and that helped him get through a bunch of years of hunting freaks well battered but still alive. His scar tissue got worn like medals, were displayed just as proudly.

Soledad, hand to her throat. Absentminded.

Yarborough had pointed out his wounds to Soledad in a morbid show-and-tell. A puncture in his chest where a telekinetic had sent a sharp piece of something or other. Teeth marks where a shape-shifter tried to bite out part of his leg.

"And you see this?" A scar on his temple Yarborough stuck a finger at with glee."Know who gave me this?"

Soledad didn't.

"Gave it to myself. Shot myself in the head. Or a telepath tried to shoot myself for me."

"You went up against a telepath?" Soledad, impressed. There were only a very few MTacs, anywhere, who'd ever mixed it up with a telepath and lived to tell. And that was the thing: Out of all the boasts Yar'd made to Soledad since she'd arrived at Central MTac, going against a telepath wasn't one of them.

"Hell yeah." Big smile."When I was working Valley."

"What happened?"

Yarborough's smile got doused."You're looking at all that's left of that Valley MTac. Nothing you can do about telepaths. Not a goddamn thing."

Guilt. Heavy, hurtful, ugly. Yar had lived while others had died, and now he had guilt for doing nothing more wrong than somehow keeping alive. And Soledad got exactly why he didn't talk about going against a telepath; the guilt he felt, she knew very well.

Yarborough took a beat, recovered a little, got back to being a BAMF. Telepath couldn't put him down, he boasted. He hadn't met the freak that could.

Then he asked Soledad about her gun, about how she was able to take out the pyro.

She explained things to him, the tech that went into her piece: a modified O'Dwyer VLe. The first all-electronic handgun. No moving parts. Nothing to wear down. Nothing to ever get jammed in the middle of a shoot-out. Not even a magazine. Not a regular one. The bullets were stacked in-line in the barrels—yeah. Barrels. Soledad's piece had four—and fired electronically. Four shots in less than 1/500 of a second. A recoiling barrel meant the rounds would fire at one aim point before there was any recoil effect. Audio/visual settings confirmation. Distance-to-target meter. Electronic lockout. Digital download and upgrade capacity…

On and on and Yar got all juiced just listening. It was the future Soledad was carrying. And once they got healed up, with the new side arms Soledad had, they were going to kick some serious freak ass.

Except, Soledad thought, for what Bo had told her. There might be, there probably was going to be, trouble about her gun. Soledad wasn't on so many drugs anymore. The thought of trouble started to worry her. She didn't share the worry with Yar. Yar was happy with his new wounds. Why spoil things?

They talked on a while more. Yarborough talked on, told stories. Every one an adventure, and every adventure ending with a mutie down and him victorious. Soledad couldn't be sure of the ratio of truth to fiction, but for the minute that was unimportant. The stories were spun well, exciting, and they made her think at least for a second that normal humans had a chance in their war against the metanormals.

When she left Yarborough's room, when he was worn out from recanting and the sedatives a nurse had given him, Soledad felt invigorated. Felt almost good. Except for her limp and throb from her burns. Except for those.

Easy. Visiting Yarborough had been easy. Almost fun.

Visiting Reese…

Soledad stood looking at the body, wondering how many more seconds of searing heat would've left her in Reese's place. She wondered, too, if it would've been better for that thing to have fused the arteries that ran up and down her throat, to have out and out killed her rather than put her in the phantom zone between life and death where it put Reese.

Down the hall: A nurse walked. A door opened. A draft swirled through the corridor, finding Soledad. It lifted her flimsy gown and played with her flesh before dissipating to still air.

Did Reese even dream? Soledad thought she remembered hearing that people in comas don't dream. But she only thought she remembered that.

And weren't you supposed to talk to them, the comatose? Couldn't they hear you, and if you talked to them, wasn't that supposed to help make them better? Help them heal? Soledad thought she remembered hearing that too.

But if they— Soledad checked herself. Reese she was thinking about. Not they. They had no name, and they was faceless. Reese had a name and a face, and Reese was alive. Forget the machines and apparatus and contraptions, Reese was still alive.

So if Reese couldn't dream, if she couldn't hear herself in her own mind, how could she hear anyone else?

And what do you say to the comatose? Come on, you can do it. You can get healthy. You can exist again if you want.

Soledad thought about that, and thought it was like talking to a plant; like coaxing it from brown leaves to a bright green. Couldn't do it. She couldn't talk to Reese like she was some other form of life: alive but without expression. She couldn't talk to Reese like… as if she were the way she was: a thoughtless, senseless husk.

All Soledad could do was mumble something the content of which even she wasn't sure of. The voice she heard, her voice, was new and different. The burns on her throat had deformed her vocal cords. She liked to think she sounded raspy. Adult and mature. She figured she just sounded like she had throat cancer.

Soledad had been standing in ICU so long the drone of life support had faded down to Muzak. It was time to go. But how do you leave someone who may or may not even know you're there? How do you leave someone who may be serene on the outside but screaming like the buried undead within?

Soledad slid fingers, gently, along Reese's shoulder—skin soft, body warm. There was still life there. There was still hope—along Reese's tattoo of the bold words.

And then Soledad left.

What is this? You want to tell me what this is?"

"It's my gun."

Soledad tried to read Rysher. Rysher was hard to read. He looked weary. Sort of. Not quite angry. Mostly he looked pained. But it was just hard to tell. Rysher'd spent a lot of years navigating the politics of the LAPD. He'd floated their currents all the way to lieutenant of G Platoon, the Metanormal Tactical Unit. Big title. Lot of responsibility. You're in charge of the people who keep superhumans in check in the second largest city in America. You don't get to a spot like that by having a weak poker face, letting everybody know exactly what you're thinking and how you're feeling. At the moment, consciously or unconsciously, he betrayed nothing. Soledad couldn't tell for sure if Rysher's look was pained or quietly furious.

"I know it's your gun, Officer. Specifically what is this?"

On his desk, where the lieutenant's finger pointed, was Soledad's case: her side arm and its clips. Six of them. Color-coded. Blue, green, yellow, orange, black and red. The red clip—phosphorus-tipped bullets—she'd used to chop the pyro. Effective but obviously not enough killing power. Maybe she needed to hollow the points, up the damage quotient to compensate for the speed lost by the friction of the burning slug against the air as it…

Soledad realized she'd been thinking when she should have been listening.

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't—"

"I asked you to tell me what this is."

Soledad glanced at Bo. Bo, arms folded, leaning against the wall, didn't look ready to involve himself in things. For the minute he wasn't Soledad's sergeant, element member. He was a spectator. Nothing more, nothing else.

"It's an O'Dwyer VLe."

That got a laugh from Rysher. Part bemused. Part dismissive."You're kidding, right? Metalstorm can't get DARPA to approve this thing past the experimental stage. HIT has written it off, and you take it out on a call? How did you even get one?"

"They sent it to me. Metalstorm granted me permission to make modifications provided I gave them the rights to all patents that resulted from my work."

Rysher, walking through things slowly: "On your own. You go out, get permission from an experimental contractor. Then, spare time, you modify a weapon?"

Rysher turned to Bo, looked to him. As always, Rysher gave nothing. Bo, maintaining his disinterested-observer status, returned nothing.

"My undergraduate work was in emerging technologies at Northwestern. I staffed A Platoon in the armory for more than a year, where I was trained in modifying both SWAT and MTac weaponry. This is not a hobby, sir. I'm fully qualified."

Under her clothes, from under her arm, along the side of her body, Soledad felt a single drop of sweat crawl down her flesh.

Light eked through the window, past drapes faded dull from years of collecting sunlight. It lit the walls, fake wood paneling, and reflected off of plaques to Lieutenant Rysher and awards to Lieutenant Rysher and honors to Lieutenant Rysher and photographs of suits and brass giving Rysher those plaques and awards and certificates. Soledad was featured in one of the pictures. Her and Rysher, him shaking her hand, the day she was accepted to G Platoon. Soledad still had sense memory of his strong grip that transferred respect. Rysher'd welcomed a lot of cops to his command over years of service. Out of all of them, that he should choose to hang a shot of him and Soledad in his office… Rysher was proud of Soledad. Had told her that on many occasions, and not just when he was handing her wall dressing. A lot of times, just passing her in the hall, he'd take a minute to stop, talk, catch up with her, then having done so end things with" I'm proud of you, Soledad." That's what made sitting in his office breaking things down for him hard. Whatever the situation, if Rysher was pissed at her… that wasn't good, but she'd deal. But, decent as he'd always been, what Soledad couldn't deal with was letting Rysher down.

Rysher, holding up one of the clips, the red one: "This is what you used on the pyro. Phosphorus, right?"

Soledad gave a nod.

Rysher held up the yellow clip.

"Synthetic slugs. For metal morphers."

"Synthetic slugs don't give you enough velocity." Rysher put that square. He wasn't just some brass behind a desk. He'd spent a long time, a lot of years, going after freaks. He knew what he was talking about.

So did Soledad."The gun has DTT auto targeting for distance modulation. Because the weapon is electronic, it can modulate the discharge with the synthetic slugs, fire them at a higher velocity relative to distance from target." That was technical mumbo jumbo. The point: "It moves the slugs fast enough to put down its target."

The green clip.

"High-density muties: invulnerables, impenetrables."

"What good is a bullet if it can't penetrate?"

"The slug is a gelcap. Contact poison. Exposed to the flesh, it arrests the nervous system in less than twelve seconds."

That one, the green clip, Rysher set down carefully."Little something for everybody."

A shrug."Nothing for intangibles, sir. I've been working on it, but freaks that can shift planes, manipulate density…? I haven't figured out anything for them yet. Or for telepaths."

Bo made a move. Slight. But he'd been so still, quiet, his slightest action was magnified by expectation. Soledad, Rysher, they both looked to Bo. He did nothing more than adjust his stance. Make himself comfortable.

Soledad tugged at the collar of her turtleneck, self-conscious.

Rysher said: "What were you thinking? How could you… Why would you do this?" He was so full of lament you'd think he was asking Soledad why she shot his dog.

"How could I do what, sir?"

"First time I heard about you, everybody was saying you were good cop."

"I am a good—"

"You worked hard, you angled for MTac. I had hopes for you. High hopes, O'Roark."

O'Roark. Her last name. Soledad couldn't recall a time, in private, Rysher didn't use her first name. Now O'Roark. No" Officer" in front of it. Just O'Roark. Distant. Cold.

Soledad said: "And I haven't done anything that—"

"The hell you haven't." Distant. Cold. Getting more so by the second."You used ordnance that aren't approved, aren't certified."

"The weapon works, sir."

"It's not even out of the experimental stage of development."

"It's… no, sir, it's not. But I have tried for two years to get the weapon certified."

"Tried how?"

"I submitted schematics, proposals, test results to A Platoon."

"And when you didn't get the response you wanted, when you wanted it, you decided to field-test your piece on your first call."

"No, sir."

"You packed that thing by accident? Sure wasn't an accident you had it hidden in this case. If you'd carried it in the open—"

Soledad began an answer, got tripped up at the starting line. Then: "It was meant to be a backup. If our element had no other option—"

"And you decide that? A probee on MTac, and you decide how to handle a call."

"What was the alternative? Do nothing while that freak put four people in a coma instead of one? At least that. I did my job. Sir."

No matter the respect she had for Rysher, in the moment, Soledad almost forgot to tack on the honorific.

Made no difference. Rysher wasn't listening. He was sitting, thinking. His fingers working at the spot where his temple met his brow.

Bo: "Sir, what's Officer O'Roark's status."

Rysher took a few seconds. His fingers kept up their work."I'm taking her off active duty."

… No…

"For now she's going to be riding a desk."

"No!"

"You're no good until the doctors give your leg a clean bill anyway. Beyond that—"

"I… sir, I don't… I didn't do anything that I deserve to be—"

"You yanked open the furnace door. Made it hot for all of us."

"I did my job."

Rysher gave a long study to Soledad. For the first time his expression revealed his feelings. He looked like he pitied the girl.

Rysher said: "You really don't see it, do you?"

"I didn't empty my clip into a kid with a shank. I chalk a righteous shooting, shot one of them, and I get sat down?"

"Your piece wasn't certified. Nobody told you to carry that thing. Technically… nothing technical about it. Your piece is illegal. No matter what kind of work it did, it's illegal and you used it anyway. You did things the way you saw fit."

"As a last resort. Better that than let cops die."

"Just trying to save lives?"

"Yes, sir. I was just trying to—"

"Freaks used to save lives, O'Roark. Freaks used to do what they wanted no matter what the law said. Do you see?"

She saw.

Soledad just then saw the total picture. Clarity of vision had come late to her. Really it was just denial falling away, some truth getting through.

Rysher: "After May Day, after the freaks wiped out San Francisco, the president issued an Executive Order. Muties are enemies of the state."

"I know."

"MTac platoons were formed with one job: enforce the letter of the law. Protect normal humans."

A little anger. At herself."You're telling me what I know!"

"You know, yes, but do you understand? Do you understand why things are the way they are? There's order, and there is chaos. The freaks are chaos. MTac is order. When we fall apart, there is nothing left."

And Rysher just lets that hang.

And Rysher said, said to Bo: "Take her, get her set up."

Bo took Soledad by the arm. Minding her limp and her cane, started to guide her from the office.

She moved like she was sleepwalking.

"O'Roark."

Soledad turned back to Rysher.

"I know you were just trying to do right. I have to be… I'm going to be straight with you."

"Yes, sir."

"The situation is problematic."

"Yes, sir."

"It's problematic, but don't worry. Not too much. We've got some good boys in this department. We'll try to fix things for you."

Bo got Soledad a desk—a standard-issue municipal desk among a field of desks in Parker Center—and the duty-bug pencil pushing that went with it, the boring core of police procedure.

Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards.

No matter she'd just been reassigned, forms and requisitions and

66s and want cards waited for Soledad when she arrived at her new position. They were waiting for her like from day one, whatever else Soledad had planned for herself, they were what she would eventually be coming around to. They slothed on her desk, a drowning pool of the mundane. Looking at them, at a distance, she felt their wasting. This is what trying to make a difference had bought. Wasn't supposed to be this way. The way it was supposed to be…

"Bo… I meant what I told the lou. I only took the gun along as a last resort. I'm tired of seeing people get killed, cops get killed. I just wanted to do something about it."

Honest with the facts: "Well, you sure pissed your chance away."

Bo started off, left Soledad to the rug she'd been swept under. He stopped, turned back. Trying to paint a decent picture of the situation: "It'll work out." Not much conviction there. Bo headed off.

Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards. Been a long time since Soledad had been near the basics of cop work.

Soledad looked around, looked at everybody else working a desk: Too young to have climbed off of one. Too old to do anything else. A couple who were too much trouble to be let out onto the streets. It was a funky little zoo of cops too-something to do anything but what they were doing: shuffling papers.

Welcome, Soledad.

Forms and requisitions and 66s and want cards.

She roboted her way through them for what seemed like all day.

A glance at her watch. It was only midmorning.

A couple of hours since she'd taken a tumble from MTac to working a desk. She sucked a breath. A couple of hours, just a couple and things had changed that much, that bad, that quick?

A couple of…

And from a desk where was there to go? Down? Out?

Jesus had she screwed things. Jesus.

Screwed, yeah, but they could be fixed. Rysher said he could fix them. Soledad would do everything she could to help. She promised herself this: She did not survive an encounter with a pyro just to get taken out by some technicality. Her and her gun had put down a flamethrower. Her and her gun had saved a whole element… except for Reese, her and her gun had. So to hell with the rules and regulations and dotted i's and crossed t's and…

And Rysher was right.

And Bo was right.

She'd fucked up. No other way, no gentle way to put it. Soledad had fucked up. She hadn't tried to skirt regs. Not on purpose. Not really. She'd only tried to fulfill a simple mandate given to herself years ago: get rid of every single metanormal freak of nature that existed.

But judgment on her actions wasn't about saving a few lives. It was about law and order, and the bold words tattooed across Reese's shoulder.

First call, and Soledad had come out no better than the mutie they'd gone after. She was no better than the things that she hated.

There was another before she came, but him I barely remember, or remember what happened to. He might've been killed fighting the Void. I can't recall.

But her… I remember the Princess. See her in action once, you'd never forget her. She could kick ass, yeah, but they all could. She could kick ass and she was beautiful. And graceful. The way she would sail above the city. Not fly, sail. It was the same difference in motion between a motor-boat and a tall ship.

She made me proud, Nubian Princess.

How many times I'd heard that, Nubian Princess, from guys who just wanted to get with me, who just wanted to break off some of what I had. Enough times that the words didn't mean anything anymore. Not until I saw her. Strength and grace and beauty embodied.

For a while, just after she first appeared, they started showing up one after the other. Quadrupleman, the Texan, Tavor, Blue Knight, Red Dawn and the rest of the Color Guard… It was getting so you needed a score-card. Incredible abilities. Unbelievable powers. Were they always among us and just then decided to show their faces? Was this some kind of sudden, incredible leap in human evolution? Aliens? Heavenly agents? Questions got asked, but there was no one to answer them. All any of us normal people knew was that we were on a schedule. Every month or so we could expect new hero, new costume, new power. Most were guys (white guys), most were brutish, most didn't get my attention beyond a" Oh, isn't that interesting. It's the hero dujour."

Most. But not the Princess.

Tough, proud, and as costumes go she actually had fashion sense. To me

she was a symbol and an inspiration, and I wanted nothing more in the world than to be like her.

And she let me down. Just like the rest of them let all of us down. Worse than that. The baseball player everyone loves who turns out to be an afternoon boozer lets you down. Same with the corporate CEO who shovels employees' 401 (k) money into his beach house in Maui. What the so-called heroes, what the freaks did: They deceived us, lied to us.

They killed us. Our spirit and then our bodies.

Be like Nubian Princess? I want nothing to do with her except to throw flowers on her grave.

La Brea and Sunset. The busiest intersection in a city full of nothing but cars and traffic.

Head to her steering wheel. Had to be this intersection?

A deep, deep breath. Relaxing for just a second. Getting calm, because this Soledad did not need. On a Saturday? On a day off and away from the department and the desk that had become a prison she commuted to daily? At least, she thought, the air bag hadn't deployed. It was, what? Three hundred dollars to replace those? That's if it didn't kill you first. But she was moving too slowly when she rear-ended the other car to set it off, the car she now sat tangled with at the intersection of La Brea and Sunset. Maybe, God willing, too slowly to have done any real damage.

Horns honked: other drivers trying to make their way around the two bumper-smacked vehicles that were slowing up traffic. They didn't care there was an accident. They didn't care somebody might've been hurt. This was Los Angeles. Slow up traffic in LA you better hope the crash kills you before some pissed, late-to-be-somewhere-that's-nowhere-important nut job with a gun does.

Soledad got out of her car. The other driver got out of his, met her halfway and hot.

"Look at this. Would you look at this?"

Soledad looked. The other car, the one she'd hit, was a Jaguar. Not a new one, an old one. She didn't know how old; what year, what model. Soledad wasn't into cars like that. But it was beautiful. British racing green with a mirror polish. Mint condition. Mint right up until Soledad took out the Jag's rear fender with the front one of her few-years-old Prelude.

"Look at this," the driver ordered again."Do you believe this?" he asked.

"I'm sorry."

"I'm stopped, I'm sitting here. You didn't see me sitting here?"

"I didn't."

"I'm sitting here at the light, at a red light, and you didn't see me? Didn't you see the light? You didn't see that? How are you not going to see a red light with a green Jaguar sitting in front of it?"

Her nonreg gun. Her desk assignment. Reese.

Soledad said: "Had things on my mind."

"Didn't see me? How the hell are you not—"

She'd caught that part before."I said I was sorry."

"Insured is what you better be."

Yeah. Fine.

Back to her car, a bit of a limp still, but she didn't use the cane anymore. No crutches for Soledad. She leaned to her glove box. Her fingers ran over Kleenex, a coupon for In 'n Out… that watch she thought she'd lost six weeks ago…

Something caught her attention. A lack of something. The other driver wasn't complaining anymore. He wasn't telling Soledad what to look at, or how she'd better be covered. What he was doing was throwing a slack-jawed stare at Soledad, at her hip, at the gun that was holstered there and revealed beneath her coat as she leaned into her car.

Simple explanation: I'm a cop. It's my off-duty piece. Soledad didn't bother. Let the guy sweat a little. Let him worry about opening his mouth and wise-talking one more time and getting a bullet for his trouble.

Insurance card.

Soledad came up out of the glove box, went back to the guy, his rant now fully replaced with awkward gawk.

"You know," he started,"if… if you're not insured, we can work something out."

Literally Soledad bit back a smile.

"It's just, you know, a classic… I got a little upset, but we can work somethi—"

"Here." The guy got Soledad's insurance card shoved his way.

With a pen he quivered down her information.

"I'll just… I'll h-have my insurance company call and—"

"Yeah."

Card back, Soledad slid into her car. She started up. She pulled around the Jaguar and took off. In her rearview mirror the guy bent over and sucked air.

Sunday. Sunday afternoon ritual. Soledad dialed the phone. It rang a couple of times, picked up.

On the other end a woman said: "Hello?"

Soledad forced a little lightness into her voice: "Hey, Mom."

Soledad loved her parents.

"Soledad! How are you, baby?"

"Good. Good."

"Soooo, what's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing new. Just, you know, same old."

The conversation was no different this Sunday than it'd been last Sunday. Maybe a little more vague on Soledad's end, a little less information on every single thing in her life than she usually conveyed to her mother. But not as vague as the conversation would be next Sunday. The level of communication she had with her parents, the world, was in a slow state of decay. Later Soledad's father would jump on the phone after coming in from doing yard work. Same as last Sunday, the Sunday previous. Same as next Sunday. For now it was just her and her mother. Soledad asked how her father was doing, her mother answered, then asked Soledad how work was, which Soledad dodged with more vagary, then went into:

"The weather's been kind of nice. A little hot, but nothing too much. Just… nice."

Soledad loved her parents.

But the weather, talk about a movie she'd seen, something good that she was reading: Any of that was all the infiltration Soledad allowed her parents to her life. Allowed anyone, really. Soledad was not a people person as much as somebody could not be one. She didn't like sitting around chitchatting about herself, listening to other people like she cared about them. Cold is what people would call her. Would if they ever got to know her. Few did. That was fine. If she didn't bother with most people, she didn't have to break down a week's worth of her life for most people. She did for her parents. But she avoided specifics. Soledad rationalized it was for their own good: not getting details on a cop's life. Wasn't really. Largely it was good for Soledad's sanity.

She remembered the time she was out running in West Hollywood and got clipped by a car. Nothing serious. Her thigh was deep purple and tender for a week. Her wrist badly sprained. A day after the accident Soledad's mother had made the flight from Milwaukee to Los Angeles with her dad in tow. She cared, that's all. She just cared a little too much for Soledad's taste.

And she worried. Soledad's mother worried constantly about her daughter. Bad enough when she was just a regular cop, her fretting kicked into overdrive when Soledad made MTac. Every time there was a report of an MTac element serving a warrant on a freak, Soledad's mother was on the phone wanting to know if Soledad was all right, still alive.

No big deal.

It's what moms do.

Except Soledad's mom would make the call even if the warrant had been served in Dallas or Miami or some other city miles from where Soledad lived, and even though Soledad had yet to go on a first call herself.

It was by the grace of God or just good fortune that when Soledad got battered around by the pyro her parents happened to be on a cruise in the Caribbean and didn't hear about it until a week after the fact. By then Soledad was recovered enough to tell them, to lie to them as she lay in a hospital bed, that the incident was nowhere near as bad as the news reported. Soledad's new voice was passed off as a bad cold. Her mom didn't fly out. One day Soledad would have some explaining to do about why her voice never changed back, why her throat was laureled with scars.

Her father came in from outside, picked up on an extension. Soledad again recounted the weather, gave an update on the book she was halfway through. While she droned on she thought maybe today was the day to end the dodging; quit lying and start including her parents in on her life. Tell them about her first call and the pyro, her short stay in the hospital and Reese's continued one. And then, Soledad thought, she should cap all that off by telling her parents she was facing an uncertain future regarding a gun she'd put together hoping to balance the normal vs. metanormal struggle in favor of the normals.

Sure.

Soledad loved her parents.

And Soledad wanted to include her parents in her life and her work and her aspirations. She wanted to be able to turn to them with her problems and fears. But she also knew what would be best for them and for her—what would keep them all happy and healthy—was to keep them blissfully ignorant. So she kept on talking about the weather and books and anything else that wasn't Soledad-specific.

At the end of forty-five minutes I-love-yous were passed around. Soledad hung up. She thought about what she'd have to do at work the following day, and how she would fill her week, the seven days, until she made the phone call home again.

It's a miracle," the reporter was saying on the television in the background on one of the morning breakfast news/weather/yak/ helpful-hint shows.

Soledad was more interested in how come she didn't get more raisins in her Raisin Nut Bran—might as well call it Not Raisin Nut Bran—but caught enough of the dry details broadcast at her to be able to piece the story together: a gas explosion at an apartment complex in Studio City. The whole thing blown up and burned down. Plenty of footage—the smoldering shell of the building, the gawking onlookers—to go with the description. But, and here's the miracle part, no casualties. No injuries even. A thoroughly decimated structure, and everyone got out alive and unharmed.

"It's a miracle," the reporter again reminded the audience.

How about that? A little good news.

That story got followed up by what went down in Indianapolis. The Indy MTac—what passed for MTac in Indianapolis—had served an EO on a metanormal.

Euphemism.

They'd killed a mutie. Not much of a mutie. It had geomagnetic abilities; could move earth and rock, do low-grade terraforming. None of that was much good against the Indianapolis MTac's bullets, and the Indianapolis MTac was all giddy 'cause in the years since the EO'd been enacted they'd finally had a shot at a freak and came out victorious.

A geomagnetic. BFD.

Soledad wondered, she wondered how they would've rated against a real freak; a pyrokinetic? Would they have survived their encounter like she had? What about a shape-shifter or metal morpher?

A telepath?

She knew how they, how any MTac, would do against that.

Hand to her neck.

She thought: She should go see Reese. View her. That was the only way to describe sitting with the comatose. Soledad hadn't done that in a while, hadn't been able to stomach it. Yeah, she should do that; visit Reese. Maybe tomorrow. No, tomorrow or the next day she really needed to spend her free time getting the front bumper of her car fixed where it hung limp from her accident. Thursday was physical therapy with her leg. And she wanted to see a doc about her throat. Was there any kind of surgery, anything to be done about the scars? But soon, real soon she was going to go and view Reese.

Raisins gone and bran soggy, she tossed out the remains of her breakfast.

Middle of the hallway. Soledad stopped, her head sprang up. The words of the cop who'd passed her just then seeping in.

"What'd you say?" she snapped at his back.

The cop turned, his face puzzled in expression."I said, 'Hey. '"

"What did you call me?"

"… I… What did I—"

"Call me. What did you—"

"Bullet. I said, 'Hey, Bullet. '"

"Bullet?"

"Cops, they've been talking about you; about what you did to that mutie. About all those bullets you got. Cops were talking, and they started calling you—"

"That's not my name."

"It's just a nick—"

"Bullet is not my name." Reacting like she was allergic to the whole concept."Soledad."

"I know. I know that. It's just a—"

"Soledad, or O'Roark, or if you're desperate for something, Officer O'Roark's—"

"Look," the cop cut her off, tired of just standing there taking what Soledad was handing out,"it was meant as a compliment. Learn to take it."

The cop turned. The cop walked away.

Soledad gave thought to yelling after the cop, telling him two or three or ten places he could put his compliment. There was no point in sharing any of them. She kept on for her desk, for the full shift of the insipidness that waited for her.

Up the hallway: Bo and Yarborough. Yar's left wrist was in a splint, a sprain mending, acquired when the element responded to a call on an invulnerable. The invulnerable got away, and Yar got a sprain that was probably not a sprain, but a break. But if his wrist was busted, regs were, Yar would have to take a seat until it was healed. So, probably, it was a break he called a sprain.

The green clip. The slugs with the contact poison. If they could've used that, Yar's wrist wouldn't've been broken or sprained or whatever, Soledad thought. The invulnerable'd be dead.

No freaks today. No calls. No warrants to serve. Like most days, for most of the MTac elements, there'd be some training, maybe some refresher course of some kind, a lot of waiting for DMI, the Division of Metanormal Investigations, to hand them a warrant, or for someone in the city—someone who walked around like they were normal—to reveal themselves for the freak they really were. Estimates, estimates by DMI, the guys and girls who kept quiet surveillance of suspected freaks, figured there were about forty or fifty creeping around LA alone. Most had fled during the thirty days the prez had given them to get the F out of the country. Most went to Europe, where they still wore their costumes, did their superhero shtick: avert a natural disaster, bag a terrorist. But the heroes weren't the only ones forced out of the country. The bad guys, the superperps, had gotten the F out too. And they kept doing their thing, trying to perpetrate evil at the highest level. And way too regularly a couple of superheroes and supervillains would mix it up in Berlin or Madrid or Prague, take out a few buildings, get a few dozen people killed, and it was real obvious our government had made the right decision: freaks stay, freaks get dealt with by any means necessary. So MTacs all over the city, in cities all over America, trained and stayed in practice, but mostly waited for a mutie somewhere to raise its head for just a split second so they could go and take it off.

Bo waved Soledad over. Two other guys talking with him and Yarborough.

"Jim Whitaker," Bo started the introductions,"and Vin Cana-velli."

Whitaker had been transferred from Pacific MTac, and Vin was reactivated from Central MTac, having just recently been clean-billed from injuries he'd collected going after a thing that could generate and discharge electricity. Soledad had met Whitaker once before. Decent guy. Good cop. Except that he was eager to please. Always seemed to be working hard to be everybody's friend. Made him come off a little jittery, a little jumpy, like a dog that couldn't wait to do tricks for its master. Standing still, Whitaker always looked like he was doing a salsa. To Soledad's thinking anyway. Red hair, pinkish skin, he was the kind of guy who should've had a nickname like Rusty. Vin was new to her. Dark in complexion and smooth in feature, he looked like maybe he had originally come to LA to get into the business of show, but by some twist of circumstances had ended up in MTac.

"Good to meet you, Soledad." Vin was following up an enthusiastic hello from Whitaker."Heard you did a hell of a job on that fire freak."

Soledad nodded her head some. Kind of said something, snide, about getting put on a desk for her efforts.

Vin, picking up on that: "Can't imagine Whitaker and me replacing you and Reese for long."

"I can't imagine you replacing us at all."

Vin took a verbal step back."Don't take that wrong. I didn't mean anything."

"You don't mean anything, why are you saying anything?"

"Just making conversation."

"Well, you're doing a shitty job of it."

"I think you and me are starting off wrong. Want to try this again?"

"Why bother? You're just around temporary, right?"

Amused, not fazed, Vin smiled."Sure. Just keeping it warm for you."

Ever the appeaser, Whitaker started in with: "Hey, after shift, we all oughta head up to Los Feliz and grab—"

"See you, Bo, Yar." Soledad meant to get the last word in.

Vin beat her with, all sugary: "You be careful working that desk."

He was a most nondescript kind of guy. A little too tall to be short. Somewhere between fat and thin. His hair wasn't quite blond, not really brown either. Nothing about him stood out. A glass of warm water. Eggshell wallpaper. He was like that. You could stare right at the guy without even noticing him. Except Soledad couldn't help but notice him as he worked his way through the drawers of her desk.

Soledad stood, stared at him.

The guy kept up his search oblivious to, or unconcerned with, Soledad.

"Help you?" she asked in a tone that wasn't really asking much of anything, but more like saying: What are you doing?

The guy, the eggshell guy, remained oblivious. Or unconcerned.

Soledad cut straight to the subtext."What are you doing?"

No longer oblivious but still unconcerned, the guy held up identification.

"IA," Soledad muttered."So it's like that."

"It is like that." The guy closed a drawer and opened another. Had himself a look around. Finished, he raised his head. His eyes weren't blue, or green or hazel. They were some other dull color."Let's you and I talk."

Interrogation room. Morbid gray. Two-way mirror. A table bolted to the floor and a couple of chairs. Same room Soledad had used how many times, early days in SPU, to sweat perps who sat across the table, to wear confessions out of them? She sat, this time, on the other side of the table. The get— sweated side. The get-worn-away side.

The eggshell guy, his name was Tashjian—only distinct thing about him—sat where Soledad would have in times past and made a show taking a casual stroll through a jacket, her jacket. But all he was doing was looking at it, not reading it. No doubt he'd dug through Soledad's records like they were a boneyard long before he ever pulled up a chair with her. The performance was for Soledad so she could watch him fake-read, and he could watch her watching him to see how she took it.

She took it no different than if he was looking through an L. L. Bean catalog. She didn't care.

When Tashjian got through with his one-man show, he said: "O'Roark."

"What?"

"Nothing, I was just reading. Your name; I was just reading it here. Soledad O'Roark. Odd."

"My name?"

"Yes. Odd."

He couldn't get past her name without throwing darts? This was going to be fun."My name is odd?"

"Not the name. God, no. Who am I to talk about… The spelling. Don't normally spell 'O'Roark' like that. Guess it doesn't matter. Not like you're Irish."

That. Soledad knew what he was getting at: her being black but having an Irish surname. Like that was as unusual as having a third eye. It was only more games. An IA rat trying to light a fire to see what would bubble up. Soledad just took it. Like a slap to the face, she just took it.

Tashjian: "So you shot a mutie."

"You know I did."

"I know. But pretend I don't. Pretend I'm ignorant. Pretend I don't have a file on you thick as a phone book."

"Yes," Soledad roboted."I shot a freak."

"With that gun of yours. Hell of a gun, that gun of yours."

Like everything else about Tashjian, his voice was just there. Not squeaky, not monotone, not angry or accusatory or hey, buddy-friendly. You could read nothing from the way he talked at you. Just then, Soledad couldn't tell if the crack about the gun was a poor attempt at compliment or some kind of bait, so she let it pass.

"Where'd you learn to put together something like that?"

"It's in my jacket. My jacket you've already read."

Like he didn't even hear: "Where'd you learn to—"

"Northwestern. I majored in emerging technologies."

"Well, that's handy. You studying emerging technologies, learning how to make special weapons, then going on to join an MTac. Oh, hold a second…" Tashjian made a show of just then recalling something. Shuffling through Soledad's file for a paper he knew the precise location of: "Says here you did your grad work in metanor-mal psychology. Is that right? Did you do that?"

"Why are you playing these—"

"Did you?"

More of the robot voice: "I did my grad work in metanormal psychology."

"Well." That's all Tashjian said for a minute. Just that word, then nothing, as if he was taking a second to process this overwhelming flood of information he already knew. Then, again: "Well." And:

"Seems to me like you had it in your mind for a long time you wanted to be a freak hunter."

"That so unusual?"

"Some kids grow up wanting to be firemen. Some wanting to be chemical engineers. Some kids grow up wanting to go after freaks. Now, I think it's as unusual as hell to want to be a chemical engineer. But as far as going after superhumans to earn your pay… Let's find out if that's unusual."

Sarcastic: "And how do we do that?"

"Here's how: Why?"

"Because I ha—"

Tashjian's eyebrows gave a slight spike.

"Metanormals are a clear danger to our society and I've made the decision to dedicate myself to upholding the Executive Order enacted regarding—"

"You were going to say hate."

Nothing from Soledad.

"You were going to say you hate them."

Nothing from Soledad.

"Look, you hate them, you hate them. I hate them too."

"You're not being investigated by IA. You don't have to worry about somebody twisting up everything you say."

"Not much to twist up. Fourteen years since May Day, good luck finding anybody who doesn't want to see every freak put down. Yeah, the bleeding hearts, but some people don't eat meat either. Go figure."

Nothing from Soledad.

Tashjian closed up the file, flipped down his pen."Honestly, Officer, on the record, I'm happy for your piece. Happier if it went to work on every freak left in the city, then started working its way toward New York. Christ, not like we didn't give these things a chance. Thirty days to get out of the country, they can still turn themselves in anytime for deportation. And then they get paid on top of that." A little spark, finally, to Tashjian's voice."They get paid, what?"

"Fifty thousand dollars."

"Fifty thousand dollars in reparations on top of whatever they make selling the hard assets they can't transport. And with all that, you still got the lousy LA Times writing a piece about the freaks' civil rights every other week. They want rights, get out of the country. Go to France and get some rights."

"The Times is an also-run," Soledad tossed in."They've got to be contrary so somebody'll read them. Nobody's reading them anyway."

"However it is, ground zero, May Day, was just north of here. Could've been here. So you see where I'm coming from, Officer? And you can see I'm just asking: Why?"

"Why what?" Soledad had lost the question.

"Why dedicate yourself to hunting freaks?"

"I guess… I was very affected by what happened in San Francisco."

"You weren't born there."

"No, I wasn't."

"Have family there?"

"No."

"Friends?"

Soledad just sat for that one, not even bothering with an answer.

"Cold?"

"What?"

"You cold? Turtleneck, day like today, I figured maybe…"

"Why are you doing this?"

"Asking questions, that's all."

"I've done the drill enough times. Cops don't ask questions for the sake of asking."

"I'm not here to do bad things, Officer. I don't have to be. I'm just here to collect information. Maybe I'm even here to help."

"Yeah. You're my new best friend who was digging through my desk while my back was turned." Fingers became fists. Soledad's hands, living a life of their own, acted like they wanted to take a swing at Tashjian.

"I am trying to help, trying to see things your way. You make it hard when you sit there behaving like some poor, pathetic vic."

"You know what…"

"You made this gun, right? Modified it. Chose to carry it. You chose to go around the regs. Far as I can see, what happens now, you did this to yourself." From his pocket Tashjian took a pack of gum. Wrigley's Big Red. Spicy stuff. Carefully he selected one, tweezered it out with his fingers. Undid the wrapper. Chewed it. Setting the pack on the table, he flicked it to Soledad, who flicked it right back.

Tashjian: "It's a little hard to understand, that's all I'm saying. You can see that, can't you; it's a little hard to understand this obsession you've got."

"It's not… So is every cop on the force obsessed? The second you put on a uniform and try to uphold the law, does that make…" Soledad trailed off, not seeing the point in trying to state her case to the top of Tashjian's head. His face was down, buried in Soledad's jacket, which was apparently too engaging to put aside.

"That's just such an unusual way to spell 'O'Roark, '" he fascinated."Never seen it spelled that way before."

Soledad stared at Tashjian.

Stared at him.

She said: "I screwed up. I know I did. So if I've got to, I'll take what's coming to me. But meanwhile, there're freaks running around free as they please, and you'd rather fuck with me than go after them. So do your job, do what you have to. But I don't have time for this, I don't have time for your bullshit questions or your bullshit games." A hand whipped out to the file. The papers inside flipped up, snowed down."I got work to do."

By the time she heard the door slamming behind her Soledad was well down the hall. Then Soledad was pressing her forehead to the wall, holding herself up. Catching air. Soledad could feel her body shaking. She could talk tough all she liked. Truth: That plain guy she'd just left behind; sitting across from him, knowing the kinds of trouble he could cause for her, truth was he put a hell of a scare into her.

A hand on her shoulder. Bo's.

"Howzit?" he asked.

"I'm good." Still shaking some, sweat on her palms; Soledad wasn't even in the neighborhood of good.

Bo saw but said nothing about Soledad's state.

They walked.

"IA come at you hard?"

Soledad looked to Bo: "You know?"

"Tashjian's been around. He asked me some about you."

"Could've warned me."

"IA asks questions, you're not supposed to talk about it."

"And I'm the only one around here who breaks regs."

"You just have to be careful about things."

"Careful why? Careful because I'm going down and nobody wants to get caught up in my wake?"

"You don't know how things are going to work out. You've got me backing you… Soledad." Bo caught Soledad by the arm, turned her to him."You're good cop. If you weren't, I never would've wanted you on my element. I'm backing you, Rysher's backing you. This is gonna get worked out. You were trying to do right and this… it's gonna get worked out."

It sounded good anyway. At least Bo knew how to put confidence into things when he wanted to.

He said: "Well, now maybe I can talk to Rysher; get you back on the job. Your leg's healed up, and you sitting on a desk isn't doing anybody any good."

Soledad appreciated that and told Bo so and thanked him in advance for whatever he could do.

And then Bo offered: "Maybe sometime you could come by the house. My wife's fierce in the kitchen, loves having people over to cook for. Don't know if you cook much for yourself."

Soledad looked up, over. A couple of detectives, older guys, staring at her. She turned some, shut them out.

To Bo: "Thank you, but I don't think I'd be good company right now."

Soledad thanked Bo again for trying to help out.

Bo walked away.

Walking away. Suddenly that seemed, to Soledad, like a right idea. She thought about bagging the rest of the day. Hell with it. Just walk away, go on home and veg. It was just paperwork waiting for her. But paperwork was now Soledad's responsibility. Hate it or not, she didn't know, honestly didn't know how to ditch her responsibilities. That, or work was all she had in her life. In a fashion it had been her life since San Francisco.

Either way, she headed back for her desk.

Bludlust was the worst of them. There were others, all bad. Thrill Kill, Death Nell, Headhunter. Even The Liquidators managed to snuff the Giggler, but that was mostly luck. Bad luck for the Giggler. But Bludlust was the worst of them.

We should have known.

The moment Nightshift first showed up we should have known if there were these… heroes with supernormal abilities, sooner or later there would have to be super bad guys. And there were. Plenty of them.

At first they were just a better class of perp; ripping off the US Treasury or Fort Knox instead of a 7-Eleven or a liquor store.

It got worse.

Kidnapping the pope, holding the entire UN General Assembly hostage, pointing a death ray at St. Louis. You believe that? A death ray? That's what Hatchetman called it.

Hatchetman and his death ray. Funny except the thing could actually kill people. Could but didn't, because Nubian Princess stopped him.

They were like opposite sides of a coin, the heroes and the villains; the names, the costumes. So very much alike except one side was virtuous and the other side would kill without a thought. It was all so unreal, good and evil going at each other, like watching theater. It was all so far beyond us. And every time the battles between the two sides would escalate, the weapons of destruction became more absurd as they got more deadly. Geothermal devices, antimatter projectors, chrono-temporal displacement units. Forget the freaky names, the mad science that went into them. Those things could wipe out thousands in one swipe. But always at the last second of the eleventh hour, from out of nowhere, in

would swoop The Stylist or Pronto or Nightshift or Civil Warrior to save the day.

Routine it got to be. And, sure, maybe a few people would get killed along the way—a few of us lowly nonendowed normals—but there was nothing new about that. When weren't people getting killed by criminals? How much difference did it make if it was a junkie with a dull knife, a banger with a MAC-10 or Body Count with a sonic resonance device? Dead is dead, and that's as bad as it gets. And at the end of the day the heroes always, usually, beat the villains because the heroes were smarter than them. Better than them.

Better than most of them.

But Bludlust, he was the worst of them. A genocidal serial sociopath.

Shrink mumbo jumbo.

He got off on killing lots of people. Lots and lots of people at the same time. And with his freak supernormal brain he had the smarts to do it. He'd go after a bus, an airplane, a city block or a building. Usually he was nick-of-time-stopped by Pharos, the best of the metanormals. Handsome with his blond hair, golden suit and white cape. He was iconic, angelic. He was the perfect foil to an inhuman beast who could barely keep fed his appetite for destruction. Their battles raged back and forth so commonplace we got used to them in the same way you get used to earthquakes or tornadoes. Nothing you can do about them, right? You just live with them. Besides, the superheroes would take care of us.

Right?

San Francisco. Symbolic. It was where Nightshift, the original meta-normal, first appeared. Bludlust—with some kind of crazy megaweapon— was holding the whole city hostage. Again. Barely rated live coverage on CNN. And at the last moment Pharos raced to the rescue. Again.

And then something happened that had never happened before. The thing, the device, weapon: it went off.

The first day of May.

One second San Francisco was there, the next, half, three-quarters of it was a burned-out, scarred-over, heat-fused piece of rock that looked as if

nothing had ever existed there before. Like nothing would ever exist there again.

One second, one fraction of a moment in time, and the world changed.

Bludlust was eventually caught by the metanormals. He was executed by us normals. No trial, no appeals. He was put to death. It was his fault. His fault, and maybe Pharos's fault. If he hadn't fought Bludlust, if he had just let us pay the ransom…

Maybe, we got to thinking, it was all their fault the metanormals, good and bad. Running around like demigods in their rainbow wear. Who asked them to fight for us? Who asked them to save us? Who needed them?

The president, the Executive Order: Any person or persons who displays, uses or is known to possess abilities that are metanormal or supernormal shall be rendered immediately persona non grata without rights or expectations of rights until deemed by a court of law to be entitled to such rights as provided by the Constitution of the United States.

Political mumbo jumbo.

Kill freaks is what it said.

Most of the muties took their thirty-day grace and went off to Europe to live. Europeans didn't care what happened in San Francisco. They were glad to have the freaks around to save the day.

Fucking Europeans.

But a lot of the freaks stayed, went" underground," living among us like they were" us." They stayed because they were afraid they'd be killed trying to get out of the country, stayed to make a statement. Stayed because they thought they had a right to live wherever they wanted.

Sorry, freaks. The EO says you've got no rights.

After San Francisco—that's all anyone ever had to say,"after San Francisco." It had become a new obelisk on the time line of humanity— after they had destroyed the city, when police started forming the MTacs, I followed them, read about them in the papers and on the Net. Read about them getting killed off going against pyrokinetics, telekinetics, energy conductors, levitators, invulnerables and, especially, telepaths. After following

their exploits for a couple of years there were two things I was sure of: I wanted to join an MTac, and I didn't particularly want to die. So I studied freaks; studied their psychology, their physiology. How they think and how they functioned. And I studied technology. After I'd done all that, I made myself a gun.

Michelle ate.

Vaughn watched, pained. Emotional not physical.

Michelle bit into her chili cheeseburger. With her tongue she lapped up a half-torn pickle that hung from the edge of the bun. She managed to curl it up into her mouth, smiling at her accomplishment. Smiling about being outdoors and among people too. That's what caused Vaughn the pain: Michelle's smile. She should be smiling, but she should be smiling in Asia de Cuba or Orso or some other overpriced faker of trend, not sitting in a plastic chair half hidden out back of Pink's.

Aubrey sat next to her, not eating, just rubbing a spoon with his thumb. Habit.

At a table nearby was a family. A little girl, maybe about six, held a balloon by its string. Her brother, just a little older, found a safety pin on the ground.

Michelle wiped chili from where her lips joined her cheek.

Chili? Slop. She ought to be eating roast duck, Vaughn thought. Grilled turbot. Mahimahi flown in from the Hawaiian Islands. Fresh.

Maybe that was exaggeration.

Michelle deserved all that, yeah, but at the very least they should be at El Coyote, Barney's Beanery… They should be seated at a table, waited on in public like any other group of nice, normal—

Vaughn kicked out a little laugh.

Where they should be is at home, in the dark, in the quiet, listening and fearful of every sound, every shadow.

The little boy opened the pin, snuck up on his sister to pop her balloon; give her a good scare and make her cry. It was little-boy fun.

Michelle had begged, as she did every couple of weeks, for Vaughn to take her out somewhere. Anywhere. Anyplace there were people and relatively fresh LA air. Anyplace she could see bright eyes and hear laughter, and if she could eat food that wasn't out of a can, that'd be good too.

Michelle was not to be refused. Vaughn could deny her nothing, couldn't/wouldn't even try to coax her from her desires. He seriously doubted if coaxing, as he called it, would have any effect on Michelle in the first place.

So there Vaughn was behind Pink's—as unassuming a public place he could think to be—with Michelle and Aubrey, who stayed with them because Aubrey thought there was safety in numbers. That wasn't particularly true. But Aubrey was fairly helpless alone, and Michelle wouldn't send him off on his own into an environment where day and night he would be potential victim to habits; a kid who couldn't remember that sucking his thumb was punishable by death. And that's how Vaughn looked at it, the obligation he felt: an adult taking care of a child. Someone who knew better taking care of someone who knew nothing at all.

Vaughn, when he was honest with himself, dug the feeling. He couldn't say why, for sure, but being a protector? He dug that.

The table behind them: the little boy jabbed his sister's balloon with the pin. It didn't pop. He jabbed it again, then one more time. Nothing. Then he got yelled at by his mother for picking up a dirty pin off the ground and for trying to make his sister cry. And it was the boy who did the crying.

The little girl looked to Michelle.

Michelle smiled.

With a napkin Vaughn dabbed at the sweat beading Michelle's forehead. It was the overcoat she wore, she had to wear, never mind the heat.

"We oughta go," Vaughn said.

Michelle looked sad.

Vaughn didn't press the issue.

Michelle got her smile back, went back to the incredibly joyful act of devouring her food in the open air.

A table over and down one: a couple of older women. One of them—one of the breed, their own business too boring, who have to get nosy with other people's—gave a long look with passive intensity at Aubrey, Michelle and Vaughn. A" what's wrong with this picture" gaze at the pudgy, balding man with plenty of forehead whose hands, like a child's, couldn't keep from touching metal spoons. At the beautiful young woman, pale skin in a too-heavy overcoat, and the young gaunt man—one step removed from emaciation—who sat nearly still but who seemed to be everywhere at once.

Vaughn glanced at the older woman.

Real quick she looked away, and with the same quickness thought of ponies. Green meadows—it was clovers that gave the landscape its green. This she knew from the vividness of the image—filled with young horses playing, and neighing, and biting, and fornicating pressed all other thoughts from her mind.

Liquid warmth above her lip. The woman noticed her nose bled slightly.

Vaughn, again: "We need to go."

Michelle displayed faux-pouty, truly sexy disappointment.

They wouldn't be going anywhere until she was ready.

So Vaughn sat, watched Michelle eat and one more time took the spoon from Aubrey's nervous hand.

On the street, from Melrose, rubber screamed against asphalt. A pair of horns blared at each other, blending into the noise of metal twisting with metal in violent copulation.

Michelle, Vaughn, Aubrey: none of them raised their heads to look to the sound. None reacted particularly this way or that to the crash, to the people who chased the noise to the street and the few wild screams that followed. The only thing that occurred among

Michelle and Vaughn and Aubrey was for Vaughn to say, to mean without wavering: " 'Kay, that's it. We gotta go."

Michelle responded with another bite of her burger.

Out on the street people gawked and commented at the accident. Detached. A crowd watching a television program, not a vicious collision of vehicles. The event was happening but not happening, because it was happening to someone else. It was terrible, yeah, but not as terrible as it would have been if it had happened to them. It was a tragedy, but not so much of a tragedy they didn't press closer for a better view.

From the gawkers came updates of the program in progress: A Gelsons delivery truck and a compact Nissan had disagreed at the intersection of Melrose and La Brea, with the truck, literally, coming out on top as trucks do when they get it on with little Japanese cars. Three people… four the update went. Four people were in the Nissan when it was crushed under the big rig. A couple and their two small children. The truck had rolled completely over the car, compressed it to near flatness under fifteen of its eighteen wheels. The Nissan left barely recognizable as much more than twisted, lacerated metal. And yet, and here was the big news flash, no one in the car—not the couple, not their two kids, none of them—was injured. They were without so much as a bruise, scrape or scratch.

Vaughn: "Michelle…"

Michelle nodded. She knew. A few fries, a few sips more of her cream soda. She stood. All three of them did—Vaughn taking the curled spoon from Aubrey, tossing it in the garbage for no one to see—then walked north on La Brea away from the accident.

At the accident, at the reality/virtual reality event, someone exclaimed during the closing minutes of the show as the family was pulled dazed but unharmed from the wreckage: "It's a miracle!"

G Platoon, MTac's official designation in the Los Angeles Police Department, was split into five units: Central, West LA, Valley, Pacific and Harbor. Each unit was made up of two elements. Each element was made up of three officers and a senior lead officer.

Rysher had been with the LAPD MTac since its inception, its inception being the people of America saying to their president: do something.

The Posse Comitatus Act said the military couldn't do anything. And from the get-go, right after May Day, Europe—the oh so self-righteous international community—was butting its nose in, giving America crap about the laws Congress was writing up concerning metanormals.

So America had to look like it was obeying its own Constitution.

So the president signed an EO that basically said to local law enforcement agencies: do something.

So the LAPD, every PD, did something. They went after all metanormals who refused to leave the country. Whether they fancied themselves as superheroes or villains, even if they were just regular Joes who never put on spandex, but could levitate a car with a shallow thought, they were now criminals. And every freak they went after, every warrant they served, the cops learned from trial and error. Error equaling death. The first thing they learned was that regular cops and metanormals don't mix, regular cops getting sent back from a tangle with a metanormal in body bags. If there were any bodies left to bag. What they learned next was that SWAT cops didn't do much better than regular cops. After that the LAPD, every PD, began forming Metanormal Tactical Units. MTacs. That's when they started learning things that were useful.

They learned an MTac element should only be four operators. A regular SWAT squad would go in with two five-operator elements. Ten strong just to take down bank robbers, bangers or disgruntled ex-employees with AK-47s. With MTac there were only the four. Fewer funerals that way

They learned that you don't send cops wearing metal after a metal morpher. A belt buckle, a shoe clasp, anything metallic on your body could be turned into crawling shrapnel, a slithering razor, a weapon against you. This piece of knowledge came at the expense of the original Harbor MTac. After that synthetic gear was standard issue.

They learned invulnerables and impenetrables usually didn't have enhanced strength.

God overgives with one hand.

They couldn't be shot, but they could be stopped. A well-juiced stun gun did the job good.

Pyrokinetics, the firestarters, had to have a visual before they could induce combustion.

And cops learned, most importantly, if you went up against a telepath, you were as good as dead, most times from a self-inflicted gunshot. That was their signature kill. The ultimate fuck-you.

It was all in the training manual you got with a" Welcome to MTac" your first day of basic.

Rysher had written the manual. Parts of it. The manual itself put together piecemeal, most of it a puree of standard police procedure with theories added and subtracted based on whether cops going at superhumans lived or got killed. As more cops survived encounters—by training or skill or luck—as the elements were filled with more BAMFs, Rysher got credit. Rysher and others who'd sewn together the manual. And Rysher and the others got plaques and awards, and Rysher got an office and a wall to hang them on.

An office with a door that Bo knocked on and waited, respectfully, outside of before being invited in.

Once in, standing before Rysher, he asked: "What's going on with Officer O'Roark?"

"At the moment, nothing."

"IA coming around asking questions isn't nothing, sir."

Rysher's hands flipped over, popped open, signaling powerless-ness in the situation."You know as much as I do."

"You don't know who started the investigation, why?"

"You know why."

"Hell yes, I know. I was there. I was one of the cops who got his hind end pulled out of the fire. Literally."

"With a nonreg weapon."

"She did it on my element. You don't hear me complaining."

"It's not what she did, Bo. You know that. You know it isn't."

"Yes, sir."

"It's how. She knew the regs and went the other way. There are any number of people upstairs who'd like to make sure the LAPD doesn't come off like a pack of vigilantes. All that does is give Amnesty International and their bunch ammunition. I'm guessing IA finds something it doesn't like about O'Roark, they're going to come after her hard as they can."

"Oh, hell, Freddy…"

Rysher looked up. He could do without the familiarity.

Bo: "What is going on? Look, you made the girl sit out. She gets it. Beyond that, it's us operators who've got freaks coming at us one every other month. I don't know an MTac who'd care Soledad used a little independent thought. So why the hell should anybody else?"

"It's our job to care. It's my job to keep a thumb on five units, forty cops, and make sure they're alive enough to go home to their families every night. And when something goes south, I'm the one who takes the punches like a mud wall trying to hold back a tidal wave."

"Why would you be taking punches?" Bo, a cop, always a cop, picked up words and puzzled them together."She did this on her own."

Rysher looked down to the papers he'd been reading through before Bo'd come in. He looked, but he didn't read them. He said, to Bo, but still looking at the papers: "This is my fault."

Bo didn't get that. Before he could say anything, Rysher went on with:

"Maybe I moved her up too quickly, instead of when she was ready."

"She did good work everywhere she landed straight out of the academy," Bo, defending Soledad in her absence."I don't know too many cops more ready for their first call."

"Maybe. I just… when I look back on things, I wonder if I pushed her because… because I thought it would be good for us to have someone like her around."

"Someone like…"

Rysher's head shook, slowly, full of self-lament.

Someone like… And for the very first time Bo considered, just for a second, but he considered it just the same: Was Soledad good cop, or was someone like her just good to have around?

Pushing aside the thought, Bo said: "Put her back in uniform."

"No."

"I'm just saying at least let her wear blues and a badge."

"Bo, I can't."

"Why not?"

"Officer O'Roark is under revi—"

"And it's guys like me out there watching bullets bounce off of freaks or dodging them while they turn into panthers and try to rip our heads off. I don't care what anybody else upstairs thinks. They're upstairs, not out on the streets. And if they've got a doubt, at least put her back in uniform and let her prove them otherwise."

With the back of his thumb Rysher rubbed at his lip, the action disconnected from anything in particular."I'll see what I can do. But what I can do might not be much of anything."

"I appreciate the trying."

"What's to appreciate? I put her back out, she screws up so much as once, there's nothing any of us can do for her. Not a thing."

Even so, Bo thanked Rysher again, then left his office. Left, not really feeling better about Soledad's situation. Feeling, although he'd tried to do something, he'd accomplished nothing. Or at best, nothing good.

Patrol?" Soledad spat out the word like she was allergic to it. She'd spat it three or four times now."Patrol?" Five.

Bo said: "How many times you gonna say that?"

"What else am I supposed to… Patrol?"

"Want to be back on a desk?"

"All of LAPD, every other slot I've been in, and they're putting me on—"

"Patrol. Yeah."

"You ever ridden a beat?" Soledad paced the steps outside Parker Center. She walked them down, then back up to Bo like she was working out. Working things out, working out frustration, was what she was doing."A full shift of just riding around, riding around, getting the finger from passing cars, breaking up drunks fighting in alleys. Quicksand's a better way to go."

"A thank-you'd be nice."

"Who they've got me partnered with?"

"Dang it, Soledad."

"Thank you, Bo."

Bo gave up a smile. Unintentionally Soledad could be funny. In the time he'd known her, it was the only way Bo knew Soledad to be funny.

"I don't just mean for getting me off a desk. For watching out for me." She wasn't trying to be funny at all. She was working at being sincere."I didn't turn out to be much of a probee. I appreciate you not giving up on—"

"Hell, Soledad. First I can't get a kind word out of you, then you want to sing hymns. One or the other, but either way, do us both a favor and let's avoid a moment."

Soledad matched smiles with Bo, asked again: "Who've they got me partnered with?"

"Willie Lesker."

"Don't know him. He good cop?"

Bo took a second to color his phrasing."He's… old school."

"How old school?"

"Old old school."

"You know what? I think I want to take my thank-you back."

"Oh, hell no. I'm keeping it. Can't wait to tell everybody else on the job I got a kind word out of Soledad O'Roark."

"Everybody? My rep go that far?" Bo was kidding around and Soledad kidded with him, but mostly she kidded because she wanted to keep the conversation going. She wanted to know Bo's opinion: "Nobody thinks I've ever got anything good to say?"

"You're a tough one."

"And all these years I was thinking that was a good thing for a cop to be."

"Far as I care there's no—"

Bo's cell rang, he answered it. His wife. He held up a finger to Soledad, mouthed" Give me a sec," then moved a couple of steps away. Not that she was trying to, but Soledad caught Bo's half of the conversation. One of his kids had gotten into some kind of trouble at school. The wife was upset. Bo didn't seem to be. Calm, Bo talked his wife through the situation. One of the few pluses of being an MTac: makes the rest of life comparatively easy to deal with.

Bo talked, and Soledad stared out at the traffic beyond Parker Center, watched it crawl along the 10. End of day. Most of LA done with work. Traffic'd be crawling along the 405 too. And the 101, the 134, the 170. There was no good way home, no quick way. Even so, people tried to force traffic. Soledad could hear car horns screaming at each other. Couldn't hear, but was sure inside their GM and Ford and DaimlerChrysler cocoons drivers were screaming at each other too, flipping each other off. When summer finally hit, when it got to be a few more degrees warmer, one of them—at least one— might pull a gun and really show people what road rage was all about just 'cause they were in a rush to get the hell home and catch a rerun of Friends.

And Soledad had to laugh. Soledad didn't have to worry about rushing from one spot to another. The thing about not having a life: You were never in a hurry to get back to it.

At the bottom of the steps: a couple of cops. Uniformed. They looked up at Bo and Soledad. Stared at Soledad. One of them said something.

Soledad's eyes tightened. Looked like, she wasn't sure, but it looked like he'd just mumbled at her: "Lucky fucking bit—"

"Sorry about that." Bo crossing back over.

"… That's okay…" Soledad looked after the uniformed cops as they headed into Parker Center.

"So you just get back out on the street, keep your head down… all this'll go away. Sometimes… that's just it; sometimes it takes time."

After that, for a second, Bo and Soledad didn't say anything.

And then Soledad, one more time, for the record: "Patrol."

Hello?"

"Uh…" the voice on the other end of the phone mumbled, and mumbled—if there were degrees of mumbling—weakly.

"Hello?" Soledad asked again.

"This is…" More mumbling.

"What?"

"Is this Soledad?"

"Who's this?"

Uneasy breathing, then: "Ian…"

Soledad thought, tried to collate names with faces. She came up with nothing. The voice on the phone clarified things for her.

"You don't know me. I mean, you do… We… I was the guy you hit. You hit my car."

Jaguar Guy, Soledad thought."Jaguar Guy," she said.

"Yeah." Not mumbling. Relaxing some.

"My insurance company should've already—"

"They did."

"Then I don't think we have anything—"

"I'm not calling about that; about the accident."

"There's something else you wanted to—"

"I wanted to…" Back to the mumbling.

"Can't hear you."

"I wanted to see you."

"See me?" Soledad noncomprehended."See me for what?"

"For… because…" His voice sounded like a lot of effort was going into looking for the right thing to say, the right way to say it.

Couldn't find it. All he could come up with was what he'd said before: "I wanted to see you."

"You mean a date?" Soledad asked.

"A date," Ian confirmed. Barely.

Now it was Soledad who had trouble with the language."That's… uh…"

The conversation was devolving into sounds and non sequiturs.

"I don't know if you have a guy. I know you're not married. No ring, and I checked your insurance record…"

"Jesus, you stalking me?"

"No! No, I just wondered if… I wanted to…"

"See me," completed Soledad. A date. A date with some guy she'd run into, literally, who'd seen her once for a couple of minutes or so standing in an intersection, and wanted to see her again.

And real quick she felt, Soledad felt… flattered?

Soledad worked at remembering what Jaguar Guy—Ian—looked like. She knew she wasn't repulsed by him, so that was something. Maybe he was six or six-one. Good height. Not fat. It came to her that he was in shape enough that he probably worked out regular. Soledad liked guys who weren't body-obsessed but cared enough about themselves to at least know where a gym was located.

"Well…" Soledad hesitated. She'd been on the phone, what, three, four minutes with this guy, and not more than twelve words exchanged between them."Maybe not a date date."

"Okay. Okay. Then… what?"

"I don't know. Just not a date date."

"A date date?"

"Not a real date. We can do… something, but not like—"

"A date date. No, that's cool."

"You have a phone number?"

Ian did, of course, and gave it to Soledad. Gladly. Soledad took it down, checked it as he repeated it, promised to call. Soon. They good-byed each other and hung up.

The phone cradled, in an instant, a dozen variations of a hundred dates and the endless variety of relationships they'd be potential birth parents to visited Soledad. A prophetic flash that caused her to sit and smile, and to stop smiling when she realized she was. He was just some guy. Some guy she'd had a crack-up with who'd gotten the hots for her, Soledad propagandized herself. That's all he was. Maybe he was a nice guy. Maybe he was a fun guy. Maybe he was just a guy hardly different one way or the other from most of the rest of the guys in the world. So drop the excitement, the anticipation, she ordered herself. Just because he was the one guy who— for whatever reason in however long—decided to throw a little attention her way, that was no reason for her to feel… good?

The phone rang. Soledad's hand shot for it. Forcibly she pulled it back, let the phone chirp on. Shameful. At her age, and here she was playing schoolgirl games.

She answered the phone driving all expectation from her voice."Hello?"

It was only after Soledad was across the room grinding right fist into left palm that the memory of slamming down the phone caught up to her. She did a rewind: the phone ringing, her answering, a woman's voice saying hello, then asking: "Bullet?"

Again the phone rang. When it didn't ring itself out, Soledad crossed back over and picked it up saying nothing.

A woman's voice again. Same woman who'd just called a minute previous."Sorry. I should have said: May I speak with Soledad?"

There was a Chinese place in the Beverly Connection. Dollar for dollar, far as Soledad cared, it cooked up the best Chinese food, or Americanized version of Chinese food, in Los Angeles. And that was the thing: dollar for dollar. You could spend more, get better for your money spent, but Soledad was living on cop's pay—which, in LA, on MTac, wasn't as bad as the cliche'd lead you to think. But saving money was never a wrong idea. Soledad got her Chinese food in the Beverly Connection. She waited, ate the house fried rice, read the Daily News. Typical LA stories: gang shooting, bank robbery, actor beats up girlfriend. Harsh, dark, violent, but at least nothing like: the giggler nabs mister disaster or major force ends the liquidators' crime spree. The days of such headlines—laughable, except that the perps were deadly psychopaths—were thankfully done and over.

There was even a little good news buried in the pages. Six-year-old girl runs out into the street, gets hit, hit hard by a car and lives. A picture of mother and daughter and stunned onlookers at the scene. Mom: "It's a miracle."

Soledad flipped the paper aside, checked her watch. Eighteen minutes past the time she was supposed to meet Gayle.

It'd be another ten minutes before Gayle actually arrived.

Gayle Senna, the woman who'd phoned up Soledad the day prior, had done a workman job—in spite of making the mistake of calling her Bullet—of talking Soledad into taking a meeting. The Bullet thing Gayle apologized for as she sat.

"Sorry about the Bullet thing."

"I don't like," very firmly Soledad pointed out,"to be called that."

"Obviously. When I was asking around about you, some cops I—"

"I don't like to be called that."

A shrug. A nod. Gayle put the subject to bed and moved on."So let's talk about helping you."

"Except I don't need help."

The thing about the Beverly Connection: It's a series of shops and cafes built around one big parking garage. Sitting al fresco really meant sitting around while cars crept by looking for open spots and spewing fumes.

Gayle sucked carbon monoxide and tried to figure how long it was going to take to get to the heart of things with Soledad.

"Look, we started things wrong, and that was my fault. But let's not keep going wrong by slinging crap at each other. You need help, and if you didn't, you wouldn't be here."

"I came because me saying yes was the only way to get you off the phone."

"It pays to be persistent, Soledad." Gayle stressed the name, stressed her acquiescence. Stressed it to the point of nearly being snide."I'm tenacious like that. Good trait for a lawyer. Get it from my mother's side. Always stuck with things. Married six guys till she found one she could stand. Talk about not letting go." Gayle crossed her legs, which jutted from the skirt of a smart business suit. She had great legs, long and shaped by muscle. Even Soledad had to notice them. Gayle's great legs went with her great body, smooth skin and dark hair. She wasn't model beautiful, but she didn't miss the mark by much. That didn't give Soledad a lot of confidence in Gayle's legal abilities. In a city where good looks traded at a premium, Soledad figured the counselor never had to pay full freight for anything.

Helping Gayle get back on track: "What you were talking about was helping me."

"Yes. You're being investigated by IA. Potentially you could face disciplinary proceedings. I'll keep that from happening."

Soledad waited for more, but all that happened was Gayle flagged a waitress, ordered some potstickers.

"That's it?"

"Well, I can make you a media darling too, but I get the feeling it's not what you're looking for."

"Just like that you're going to get me out from under?"

Ignoring the question: "It's got to be eighty degrees. Are you warm at all with that turtleneck?"

Warm, yeah, but Soledad was getting used to it.

Ignoring the question: "You're going to keep me from being brought up on charges? How?"

"We're talking about the law. There's always a way around it. Provided you step carefully. The first mistake you made—"

"Didn't know I'd made any."

"Two. The first one is you're not even represented."

"I'm not on trial."

"Anytime an officer is under review by IA, or DAID, you're entitled to have an attorney present during questioning." Gayle waved away the exhaust from some kind of eighties version of Cadillac."Is there somewhere else we could—"

"You wanted to meet. Here's where we're meeting."

Letting it go, letting Soledad feel like she was running the show: "Your second mistake… let's just call it an error of judgment: You are on trial. Just because you're not staring down twelve of your peers, don't think otherwise." Gayle dug a pen, a legal pad from her bag, pushed aside the soy sauce to make room. Poised, ready to write: "So tell me what's going on."

"How about we slow things down for a second? How about you tell me about you. What do you… what…" Simplest way to put it: "Who are you?"

"I thought I was pretty clear on the phone—"

"How do you know about me? Does your firm—"

"I'm not with a firm."

And Soledad downgraded her assessment of Gayle. Good-looking, and couldn't get with a firm? Her skills have really got to be suspect.

"So how'd you find out I was… I'm having troubles?"

"I'm well connected."

Soledad laughed derisive.

"What?"

"You mean you sleep around."

"Sure. Because I happen to look good, and I get the job done, so, of course, I'm a whore."

"If you were a whore, you'd have landed a firm instead of having to make cold calls."

With her pen, Gayle drew a little box between the lines of her legal pad. Drew another. Drew another. She set the pen down."You know something? You and I are going to do good together. You've got an attitude that's as pleasant as a fist to the face. So do I. I modify it for work. Have to. But with you, I think I can relax and just be the difficult woman I am. So, no, I haven't landed a firm. Don't want to. I'm trying to build a rep, and it's not the kind most of those leather-couch establishments'll touch."

"What kind is that?"

"Defending the constitutional rights of metanormals."

And Soledad said: "Fuck you!"

And Gayle asked the waitress for hot mustard as she set down the potstickers.

"Fuck you!"

"I heard you the first time." Gayle looked over her plate of food. Six dumplings. All the same. Still, she inspected them carefully, finally settled on one and harpooned it with a chopstick.

"Those things don't have rights."

"Well…" Gayle talked around a mouthful of food."That's still being debated."

"You got a thing for muties."

"Did you know they like to be called 'extra-otherly-abled'?"

"Why?"

"Remember the Northridge earthquake, the section of the 10 that went down?"

Soledad remembered but didn't respond.

"Tavor, the Expandable Man saved my brother-in-law and about fifteen other people."

The sound Soledad made was like something had caught in her throat."You have any idea how queer those names even sound? What kind of person calls himself the Expandable Man?"

"I'll have my brother-in-law ask. He sends Tavor a Christmas card in Belgium every year."

"And you're telling me I've got problems? You're soft for freaks—"

"I told you, they like to be called—"

"Metanormals, M-norms. Muties. Whatever. You're soft for them, but you're trying to put a gun back in my hand. Meanwhile, the IA cop who's trying to bury me thinks I did right."

Gayle smiled."World's an odd place." Another potsticker got harpooned."Thing is, handling your… problem gives a young, hardworking girl like myself a lot of credibility. Freaks, as you say, used to be heroes. Maybe they could've done without the funny outfits and snappy names, but they were heroes; they saved lives, put their own at risk. Nobody told them to, nobody told them to look out for us normal people, but they did.

"Now they're killed—"

"Lawfully arrested."

"Sure. Just like Japanese Americans were lawfully rounded up and herded off to internment camps during the Second World War."

"Yeah, there's a good comparison. Normal humans to freaks."

"The comparison is racial profiling to genetic profiling: taking away someone's rights not because of what they've done, but because of who they are, what they are. It's like shooting a bird just because it flies. But then, they do that, don't they?"

"They're treated same as every other suspected perp."

"And what's cop talk for serving a warrant on a metanormal? Hunting? You hunt them?"

Soledad gave a hard shake of her head."You ACLU bunch, everything works as a concept to you. Tell you what, you try holding up the Constitution when a fire freak's throwing thousand-degree flames your way. See how much it protects you then."

"So you shoot metanormals because the law says you can?"

"When they resist arrest, yeah."

"You just enforce the law?"

"That's all we do."

"Well, I'm just trying to change the law. Then you can enforce it my way."

The sounds of cars circling the structure; over that, at close range, Gayle could hear Soledad's teeth grind.

Gayle: "A lot of stuff got shoved past us after San Francisco; a lot of politicians wrapping their careers in the flag and reactionary politics in memorial statements. Doesn't mean everything that got done was done right. When it comes time to make the change, I think a lawyer who's proven her impartiality could come in very handy."

"And I've got no say in any of this? I'm supposed to let you use me to help yourself?"

"You don't want me, you don't want me." Gayle made a show of digging in her bag, looking for her car keys."But I don't see anybody else running to your side. Cops talk big about all bleeding blue, but when it comes to facing IA charges, nobody wants to bleed with you. You've got no PPL lawyer, no legal aid. Just me." Keys in hand."So go on, tell me to fuck off one more time."

Soledad didn't say a thing.

"I'm using you, yes. But like you said: the guy who sees things your way is working against you. So if me using you gets your neck out of a noose, take it. Take what I'm offering."

A beat. No words exchanged. Armistice.

Gayle, putting back her keys, picking up her pen, getting back to things: "So tell me what's going on. The IA cop: What'd he ask you?"

"Not much of anything. I think he was just, you know… trying to get a rise out of me; get me to say something stupid. Went through my history, how I moved up through the department, why I wanted to be MTac…"

"Why did you?"

"Metanormals are a known and real threat to us, our society, and—"

"You sound like Mussolini's parrot. Forget the cop school propaganda. You: Why did you put in for MTac?"

Soledad didn't answer.

"That's got to tell you something, doesn't it, if for whatever reason you can't say why?"

Nothing… then from Soledad: "I always liked San Francisco. Can't say why, just thought it was a cool city. Maybe 'cause the 49ers didn't know how to lose a Super Bowl when I was a kid. Anyway, always wanted to go visit. Never got a chance. Now I never will."

"And that's why you're an MTac: because the metanormals blew up your football team."

"My family was going to take a trip there. I'd talked them… I'd bugged them into it. Would've been my first time going. I got sick, we didn't make it. The day we were supposed to go; first day of May. Fourteen years ago."

"May Day." And Gayle got it. Gayle understood.

For a moment Soledad's eyes went slick."I should have been there. I should have been in San Francisco." For a moment her edge faded."By some fluke I'm sitting here, when I should be…"

"… If you had been there," Gayle, voice soft,"you realize you were just a kid. You couldn't have done anything except gotten killed with a couple hundred thousand other people."

"Probably. But I didn't. So I decided to do something with being alive. I decided I wasn't going to let something like San Francisco happen again. Not if there was anything I could do about it. Anything at all."

"Like work on a new kind of gun. One especially made for dispatching metanormals."

"Yeah."

"So now you're… you're driven by a failure that wasn't your fault, that you couldn't have prevented if you'd wanted to. Or worse, you're motivated by guilt because catching the flu means you're alive instead of dead."

"I never… I don't think of things that way."

"That's called denial. I could understand if you lost family there, but this… Look, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not saying your thinking's psychotic, but somebody could spin it that way."

"Somebody like the IA."

Gayle nodded.

"So… what do we do?"

"You saying you want my help?"

"I'm asking what do we do?"

"For starters, from here on, anybody wants to question you about anything, do yourself a favor: don't say a word."

You gotta get yourself some glasses. A good dark pair. Keep all the shit out of your eyes."

Lesker was talking.

Soledad wasn't paying attention. Was trying not to. She was looking out the window of their squad. Nothing to see. They were patrolling LAPD's Central Division. Downtown LA. Streets that used to be full with foot traffic were now just full of traffic. Decades ago GM had conspired with the city to rip out all the light rail so it could fill the streets with buses and cars. Now there was nothing but buses and cars. No more people to walk and window-shop. So no more upper-end stores. No more chain businesses. Bodegas and street vendors and flea markets and the low-end customers and high crimes that went with them. Better, for Soledad, to look at all that nothing than to have to look the other way, catch a glimpse of her new partner. Patrolman Willie Lesker.

"Ride around like this for the next twenty years without glasses and you'll go blind. Jesus, look at this bunch on the corner."

A few Hispanic-looking guys standing around hoping to catch some work.

Lesker yelled at the Hispanic guys: "Hey, Ese! Como estd?" To Soledad: "Look at 'em. Grinnin' like a bunch of donkeys." To the Hispanic guys: "Arriba to you too, Poncho." To Soledad: "Christ, nobody's got jobs anymore?"

"Maybe they're taking a business lunch. Open air, you know."

Only three shifts. Soledad couldn't stand looking at her partner anymore. Listening to him wasn't much better.

"Check that one over there. Swear I rousted him not two weeks ago."

"Which one?"

"Take your pick. These people stand around yapping on a corner, then always seem to come up with enough scratch to make bail. Explain that? Don't earn that kind of money selling oranges by an off-ramp." Talking about Soledad's face: "Let me see."

"I'm okay."

"Just wanna see if you're swelling up."

Soledad didn't care about showing her new bruise to Lesker. He was there when she got it. She didn't want to show him because, really that much, she didn't want to have to look at the guy.

"C'mon, let me see."

Soledad turned from the window, got an eyeful of her partner. Lesker was overweight, but not so much to get kicked off the force. Unfortunately. He tended to be unpleasant in an annoying way, was free of ambition and was just marking time until he could draw pension. Combine all that, it was no accident he was partner free, available to work with whatever cop came along.

He checked out Soledad's face. A bad bruise had formed on the right side between her eye and temple."Shoulda just popped the bitch back."

Soledad had gotten careless on a domestic disturbance call. Not careless. Not really. No matter his years on the job, Lesker's police skills were weak and he was lazy about using them. Soledad found herself having to do two things at once. Domestic disturbance calls are not a good place to get distracted. More cops are injured refer-eeing those than any other kind of calls. Including MTac. Soledad had got herself between a drunk husband and an angry wife. Lucky all she got was an ashtray to the temple.

"Shoulda just popped the—"

"I heard you. Should've popped the bitch. It was an accident!"

"Coming at you with an ashtray? Those people don't hit cops by accident."

"What kind of people is that?"

"Those kind. That's what kind."

Old school, Bo had said. Old school didn't begin to describe Willie Lesker.

"Those fucking people. We're supposed to be protecting them, then every time a cop gets shot they have a holiday; break into a liquor store and burn it down or some shit. Christ. What the fuck are we out here for?"

"If they didn't have us, they'd only have each other to shoot at all day long."

"Hell, let 'em."

If it came glazed, Soledad wasn't sure Lesker would recognize sarcasm. Didn't matter. His focus was across the street. Another of" those people" rubbing him wrong just by existing.

"Jesus, look at homeboy in the Benz. Yeah, we're winning the war on drugs. Fucking oughta roust him."

Soledad's head swung the opposite direction, looked out her window. Only the third shift.

"Oughta roust him. Ten to one he's got an outstanding on something. Probably child support for baby number thirty-two. Got to get yourself some glasses, O'Roark. A good dark pair, before all the shit gets in your eyes."

We could go somewhere else."

"That's okay."

"I mean, if you wanted to—"

"I'm good."

When Soledad'd told Ian it was okay if they went out on a date, long as they didn't go on a date date, he figured that meant shopping or going to a bookstore or tossing around small talk in the middle of the afternoon over a couple of Jamba juices. What Ian hadn't figured on: To Soledad a nondate date was sitting in an auto shop on Little Santa Monica while the front end of her Honda got worked on. Except for the heat and the noise and the auto repair smells and the grease-covered guys sneaking Soledad the eye while they chewed their lips, it was very close to almost being something like a date.

Ian tried one more time to get Soledad around to the idea of going somewhere—anywhere—else.

"You know, across the street there's this little cafe—"

"Want to keep an eye on these guys. Minute you walk away they start making up stuff that's wrong with your car."

And she had sunglasses on. Bad enough all the other distractions, but here they were inside and Soledad kept her eyes hidden.

Ian fell back in his chair. Not defeated, but definitely taking a between-rounds breather. Ms. O'Roark was going to be work. A whole lot.

She said: "Thought you'd like this."

"Like what?"

"Thought you'd like coming to the garage with me. I mean, you like cars, right?"

"I like them, but—"

"And this place… I don't know, it's got character."

And it did. Right among the overpriced boutiques that littered Beverly Hills, the banks and finance companies, movie and television production houses corralled in Century City, the garage was a little brick throwback of a building that couldn't hold more than three vehicles at a time. Driving regular speeds down Little Santa Monica, you'd miss it if you weren't looking.

Soledad'd missed it plenty of times. Wasn't until a cop on SPU had given it a recommend that she'd driven real slow and found the joint.

They did good work at Grimmet's, the garage. Had to. Family-owned since the days when the cars that rolled through the door had names like Packard and Studebaker. They'd done a lot of star business at Grimmet's too. Headshots on the wall: Cornel Wilde, Barbara Stanwyck, the Fonz.

It was funny about LA: every shop, dry cleaners and hole-in-the-wall restaurant you went to had headshots autographed by stars. But in all the years she'd lived in the city Soledad'd never seen anyone particularly famous. Not a one. Just a guy who could light himself up and shoot flames. That Soledad had seen.

"The Jag you drive: What kind," Soledad asked,"is that?"

"Sixty-seven Series I XK-E." Ian tripped over himself answering, happy Soledad showed the slightest interest in something about him."It's nice, you know, but way too temperamental. All the Brit cars are like that. The old ones. What I really want is a Sixty-four and a half Mustang."

Soledad frowned.

"What?" Was he talking too much? Did she really not care about cars?

"That's what guys say. Whenever a guy goes on about old cars, he always says he wants a Sixty-four—"

"Sixty-four and a half."

"Mustang."

"That's because it's a classic. It's a classic car."

All Ian earned with that was a shrug out of Soledad."Camaros are cooler."

"I thought you didn't know anything about cars."

"How much do you have to know to know cool?"

Shaking his head, dismissive, adamant, not caring he should be working to earn points on their first nondate date: "You can't even compare the two."

Dismissive, adamant back: "You got that right."

"I'm talking about a classic piece of automotive—"

"Classic. Classic, not a muscle car. What I'm talking about is a muscle car, okay? I mean, yeah, you want to go pick up some drapes from the store, take your grandma to dialysis, an old Mustang is real nice, but..

Ian stared Soledad right in the sunglasses. He saw a teeny-tiny version of himself getting exasperated."You know who drives Camaros? White trash. White trash drives Camaros. They love them. That big V-8 is good for towing around their mobile homes."

"Lots of people drive Camaros." Soledad tried to think of a few. A bunch of pale trashy faces popped into her mind."… Lots of people."

"White trash and New York goombahs."

"They drive Trans Ams."

"Same shit. The shit's the same."

She fought it hard, but she couldn't help herself: Soledad smiled.

Ian got energized by this tiniest of victories. A foothold while storming the beach O'Roark. He pressed his advantage."You have nice eyes," he worked at being smooth."At least I remember them that way. I'd love to see them."

Soledad dropped her smile. For a second Ian thought he was going to be repelled back into the cold, cold water. A few seconds after that, Soledad's hand came up, slid off her sunglasses. Hard as she made that little bit of a chore seem, she might as well have been lifting a bus over her head.

And they were pretty eyes. Green. They looked good against her caramel skin. Would've looked even better if most times they weren't always burning so hot.

Soledad said: "I was really surprised when you asked me out."

"Because you'd just wrecked my car?"

"Hey, I saw the insurance claim. It's not wrecked. And wasn't just that. The look on your face when you saw my gun."

"Yeah. Well…" Ian's ass squirmed, looked for a comfy spot on his wood chair."I've got a bad habit of being attracted to the wrong women. Women with guns are about as wrong as it gets."

Out on Little Santa Monica someone was trying to make a left turn across a double yellow into the drive of the Peninsula. Traffic behind the car was getting held up. People were getting pissed. People were laying on their horns. Eventually the car made the turn. The other drivers went on to wherever they were going—now short of temper—to infect the rest of the city with their freshly acquired anger.

Falling dominos.

"So… what's with yours; your gun?"

"Hit woman for the Triads."

"No, really…"

"It's legal, it's registered. Can we talk about something else?"

"But is it, is it like protection? Do you have a restraining order against—"

"Let's talk about something—"

"Something else. Yeah, I'd like to, but you don't want to talk about anything else: your family, what's going on in your life, what you do for a living."

Shooting the mutie, the trouble over her gun, IA and lawyers: All that thrashed around in Soledad's head. Did this guy need to know any of that? Did she need to rehash it?" Maybe we should—"

"Talk about something else. Yeah. I know."

"How about we talk about you?"

"We talked about me."

"When did we talk about you? We didn't talk about you."

"Yeah, we did."

"I don't know where you're from, I don't know anything about your family…"

Between his teeth Ian gripped his lip.

Soledad: "Okay, so the sharing only flows in one direction? Why don't you like to talk about things?"

"Why don't you like to talk about things?"

There was just the sound of the cars getting worked on.

Ian said: "Told you about my job."

"Barely. Said you were an architect, but you didn't—"

"I'm not an architect. I do industrial design."

"I thought… I'm sorry, I wasn't…" Soledad trailed off into the incomprehensible.

"Landing gear," Ian said.

"Oh, yeah," Soledad remembered.

"I design landing gear for commercial jets. Business has changed a lot since Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. Then they shut that down, no more MD designs. I don't think there's going to be as much innovation as the—"

"That's a weird job."

Ian shrugged."It's decent work."

"I guess not weird. I guess I meant… It sounds kind of odd. Never thought of landing gear being designed. Not in particular. I always figured…" A little laugh. An honest laugh."I didn't figure anything 'cause it's not like I sit around thinking about landing gear." Heels to the edge of her chair, Soledad pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs. Went a little fetal."So I'm really bad company and I'm way too intense and I kind of was… part of me was hoping this would be a shitty time so you wouldn't call me again."

"Why?"

"I have a lot of guilt and I want my life to be miserable."

"… Fuck…"

"Yeah. I'm fucked-up, huh?"

"And they let people like you have guns?"

From Soledad, a sideways glance.

"For real, though, that's just… that's, like, that's a helluvan honest thing for someone to say about herself."

"I'm going through a situation. The kind that forces you to be honest about things."

Ian, again: "Fuck. Who's your therapist?"

"Don't have one. Just this lawyer…"

A couple of the mechanics working on a Volvo got into an argument about something. A lug nut or a timing belt. They went at each other good and loud, and one of the guys had a wrench, gripped hard and held low, that he looked like he wasn't afraid to use if things ended up going that way.

Ian: "I think… I think you're an interesting person, Soledad. I wouldn't say it's been a shitty time, but I don't get the feeling you and I…"

Soledad looked to Ian.

Ian didn't return the stare.

Soledad said: "You want to call it a day, I don't blame you. Really don't. Like I said, I was kind of hoping for that. But you should just know, I haven't been testing you. I've been testing myself. My world, it's not very big; there's not much to it, and I'm not used to letting other people wander around in it."

"At least we start off with something in common."

Ian looked to Soledad.

No fire in her eyes. Not anymore.

"I want to try," Soledad said."I want to, but this is going to take a while."

"How long is a while?"

"Longer than most guys would want to stick around. What you're doing now, it's a deposit on a long-term investment. If that's what you want."

Ian slumped, let out a breath long and slow.

Back on went Soledad's sunglasses.

Ian said again for the record: "Always did pick the wrong women."

The mechanics settled their dispute, quit arguing. There was nothing to fill the quiet between Ian and Soledad.

"In Japan they have this thing called haragei."

"You know about Japan?"

"There're all kinds of things to me, Soledad. Some of them aren't that obvious."

"Japan…?"

"Japan. They have this thing called haragei, and it's… it's talking without talking; without saying anything. It's just people sharing an experience. Maybe we could do that, for starts, just… share an experience."

No need to think about it: "Yeah. Let's do that."

The two sat and shared the experience of Soledad's car getting its front end worked on.

After a while the mechanics finished up, handed Soledad the bill. Handed her a little more eye. Soledad paid up, suspicious of the charges.

The experience ended.

Soledad and Ian got ready to go. Ian walked out to Little Santa Monica, to where his Jaguar was parked, started it up. When the road was clear, he pulled out into traffic and drove home.

It was opposite the direction Soledad was heading.

Had it always been there? That or one like it. Was she just noticing the picture of the girl—actress or model or singer—more endowed with chest than talent, ass than ability. She had on a bikini, a size too small and then pulled tight. She'd been yanked from the middle of Maxim or Stuff or FHM and stuck on a wall next to someone's desk.

Fine.

If the girl looked hot and wasn't good for much but looking hot, if a guy somehow felt high on himself for being stupid enough to pay hard-earned cash for a one-dimensional version of a woman… everybody was happy. Nothing to write NOW about. So the idea of a little cheesecake around Parker Center didn't bother Soledad.

Alone it didn't.

But there was that picture and there were other pictures torn and ripped and tacked and scotch-taped all over Parker Center— this desk, that locker… And there was that detective by the window, the one with the coffee mug. The one with the coffee mug that read: save a mouse, eat a pussy. How long had he had that thing? Was she just now noticing it, same as she was just now noticing…

That uniform: Was he staring at her? Just looking in her direction, or was he staring at her? That cop he's talking to: was he just talking to him, or talking about Soledad? Was he really saying…

Had it always been there? Was she always oblivious to it? Was it even, really, there now, or was she somehow making more of the stares, the cheesecake? The lips that moved slowly, were read clearly, saying: "What a lucky fucking bitch."

Had they…

Was she…

Soledad went for the motor pool. Head down, blinders on.

That's some crazy shit, I'll tell you that. Some crazy, crazy shit."

Willie Lesker was in the process of letting Soledad know the shit was crazy.

He continued to illuminate her."Just don't make good sense to me why anybody would get it in their head they want to be an MTac cop."

"We've talked about this, Lesker. Talked about this yesterday, day before…"

"Just don't understand—"

"Month and a week, how many shifts? You don't get it, you're not going to get it. I can live with that, so why don't you?"

"Just saying—"

"The shit's crazy. Somebody's got to do it."

Bad as Lesker was, for Soledad it was good to be in uniform, to bear the appearance of being a cop and a stepchild to an MTac officer. Even with the midday heat, the traffic she suffered through cruising with Lesker, it was good—she reminded herself—to be wearing a gun, small and useless as her service revolver felt in her holster.

Except for all that, it was good. Pretty good. Would've been better without Lesker.

"All I'm saying, running after them muties, ought to be glad you're done with it."

"I'm not done with it." Soledad was both being defiant and expressing a personal truth."You go after a freak once, you see what they can do… you're never done with it."

"Good goddamn way to get yourself killed."

"Being a cop is a good way to get yourself killed."

"Shit, had my share of trouble with crackheads and gang bangers, but I've never had one start flying around shooting heat beams from its eyes."

"Freaks only have one ability, not multiple. It couldn't fly and—"

"Never once." Not even hearing Soledad, or hearing and not caring.

"You learn to deal."

"Yeah, bet you do. You learning to deal with that shit on your neck? A freak give you that as a going-away present?"

The blues she wore left the burns on Soledad's neck exposed. She wished for one of her turtlenecks. She wished she was Yarborough and didn't care how many scars she'd collected.

Lesker leaned to the window and spat. The wind grabbed up the saliva, splatted it yellow-green against the back window of the squad.

Soledad was starting to think maybe this was the reason the brass had yessed Rysher's request to get her back in uniform. Maybe Lesker was enough to annoy her off the force and save the department the expense of a disciplinary hearing. Maybe that was his sole remaining purpose for being a cop. Officer Lesker: Police Irritant.

"You're on the job," Soledad said,"you've got a good chance of getting dead, so what's it matter how?"

"It matters. You're staring at death, it matters if you're going the easy way or the hard one."

She wondered: How would he know? If Lesker'd ever even glanced in death's direction, it was by pure, complete accident. Soledad was fairly sure Lesker'd never code-3-responded in his life. If he'd ever drawn his gun, it was to use it as a paperweight.

Outside her window, normalcy. The appearance of it. The traffic, drivers cocooned in cars, in their own worlds. Pedestrians slogged through hot, static air made visible by the smog. A copy shop filled with people running off resumes, poorly written screenplays. The low-end menial business of show business. Soledad speculated:

Which of them—of all those people in the cars, on the street, going about their jobs—which of them was secretly a mutie? A freak?

Lesker asked: "Know what I shoulda done?"

Soledad grunted vague interest.

"Moved to Seattle. Got on the Seattle PD. Rains in Seattle."

"Heard that."

"It rains a lot."

"Heard."

"Nobody goes out in the rain. Not regular folk, not perps."

"It's safe."

"Yeah. Safe."

A beat.

"Alaska." Soledad looked at the dash, out the window. Anywhere but at Lesker. In their time together Soledad had gotten no closer to mastering the trick of looking at him while conversing. They talked, but it was more like she was talking to herself.

"What about it?"

"Snow. Snows a lot in Alaska. It's safe."

"Yeah. Bet it's safe."

"Know where else is safe, Lesker?"

"Where?"

"Dark side of the moon. Why don't you see if you can't get yourself to the dark side of the moon?"

Lesker had no problem giving Soledad a look that told his partner, in graphic and exacting detail, just what she could do to herself.

Soledad wasn't going to be back in uniform much longer. Officer Lesker: Police Irritant was on the job.

Outside the car, across the street: voices loud and threatening. Soledad looked, couldn't make out the situation except that there was a gun involved.

To Lesker: "Roll on that."

"Aw, shit." Crime had managed to mess up Lesker's quiet day. He tapped the siren, yanked a hard U in the middle of the street. Pulling to the curb, both cops got a better look at the things. Just outside a corner market a Korean woman was having it out with a black guy. The black guy was holding a thing of orange juice. The Korean woman was gripping a gun.

Up out of the squad Lesker and Soledad eased for the scene. Lesker easing a bit more than Soledad, letting her take point. She kind of shook her head in disgust at him, but mostly kept her eyes on the Korean woman, on the gun she held. Soledad put her hand on her piece, her teeny-tiny-feeling service revolver that would be more than enough to kill the Korean woman if things worked out that way. But Soledad didn't draw it. That was one of the tons of reasons women made better cops than men: Female officers tended to navigate potentially dangerous situations with intelligence instead of force. Male cops liked to kick in doors and spit lead.

Lesker was something different altogether. Lesker just floated around in the background.

Calm, firm, like she was talking down an angry dog, Soledad said to the Korean woman: "Ma'am, put the gun down."

The only response was a wild babble of Korean.

"Put down the gun!"

"What da fuck is dis bullshit?" The black guy got all angry-brother indignant with Soledad's measured response.

Eyes on the woman, Soledad turned her command toward the brother."Stay where you are; do not move!" Back at the woman, stronger: "Ma'am, I'm asking you for the last time to put down the gun!"

"Sheeeit. Brotha had a gun, you'da blowt his head off by now. Why you havin' dialogue wit ching-chong?"

Too much going on."Shut up," Soledad yelled at the brother."You want to just stand there and shut up? Lesker!"

Lesker moved in the direction of the brother, but just slightly.

"Ma'am…" Grip tightening on her piece. Maybe it was coming to that.

A new voice: "No, no! She doesn't speak English." From out of the market: a boy, seventeen, also Korean.

Soledad confirming: "You speak English?"

"Yeah, I do." Not even the hint of accent.

"She your mother?"

The boy nodded.

"Tell her to put the weapon down and step away from it."

Quick, the woman got the instructions in Korean. There was a little back-and-forth between her and her son, but even with the language barrier Soledad could tell the boy made it desperately clear to her what she needed to do. The woman laid the gun on the sidewalk. The woman took three steps away from it.

"Ain't dat a bitch? Brotha woulda been long laid out by now."

"Hey, brother man" — danger past, Lesker got into things—"didn't you hear the girl?"

… The girl…?

Let it go.

Soledad picked up the gun, popped the clip, cleaned it working the slide twice. Nothing. No shell chambered. In another situation, if things had gotten real hectic, all the Korean woman would have been able to do with the weapon is get herself good and dead.

Soledad, to the boy: "She have a permit for this?"

"We have it in the store. I can go—"

"Later. Tell me what's going on."

Brother Man answered: "Wha's goin' on? Whatcha think goin' on? Da bitch tryinta kill me."

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Why you axin' ching-chong an' them shit?"

Soledad stepped to Brother Man, stepping past Lesker in the process. She hadn't bothered to look at Brother Man before. Now that she had, she saw fashion was a sense he didn't own. Polyester shirt. Matching shorts. Knee-high silk socks. Gator skin loafers. Along with that he trimmed himself with cheap gold, plenty of it, like he did all his shopping at Huggy Bear's garage sale.

Locking eyes with Brother Man: "I'm going to get what I need from you in a second. Right now, I'm dealing with the lady. Okay?"

"Damn, girl, whyya gotta git attitude? Black gotta do right by black, ya know?"

Soledad was already back to the boy."What happened?"

"My mother says he stole that carton of orange juice, walked out of the store with it and didn't pay. She tried to stop him, and he pushed her."

"Aw, sheeee—"

"That's when Mom got her gun."

"Dat's bullshit."

"Is that bullshit? Is it? How much bullshit would it be if I hauled your ass in? How many warrants going to get kicked back on you?" Getting the feeling Brother Man was mostly talk, Lesker was getting bold with himself. He was about to give a real live OJ-stealing street thug a hard time. He was about to get himself some stories to tell the other cops in Seattle, or Alaska, or wherever he finally ended up.

Dark side of the moon.

"I didn't steal no juice. I paid for it."

"Yeah, you did," Lesker editorialized.

"A brother cain't have ends? I got more in my pocket than you do, blue."

"You sure don't waste any of it on wardrobe, slick."

"Lesker!" Soledad's head was starting to hurt."Let's keep it civil."

"How about let's do this: How about we remember who's senior here? How about that, O'Roark?"

The Korean woman added something to all that, but she added it in her native tongue and got nothing but ignored for her trouble.

Soledad brought things back around to the boy, who seemed to be the only one present she had anything like a rapport going with.

She asked: "Did you see him take the orange juice?"

"My mother said he did."

"But did you see him take it?"

"My mother's not lying. He obviously stole it."

An eyebrow from Soledad."Obviously?"

"All those people do is steal."

More eyebrow."Excuse me?"

Lesker: "You got that."

"Muthafuckin' choon."

Something from the Korean woman.

Soledad to the boy: "I'm one of those people, all right?"

"Yeah, but you're, you know…" The boy, formerly articulate, suddenly found the spoken language a struggle."You're different." He took a moment to figure how."You're… a cop."

"All I need from you is the story straight and simple. I don't need any help with anthropology."

"Sheeeit, goddamn sellout what she is."

Soledad felt like a mill was being rolled, slow, over her. Forget the heat and Lesker and having to deal with the high crime of fruit juice theft. The alleged high crime of fruit juice theft. Here was a smart young kid taking good advantage of everything America had to offer. Except part of the package deal was all the racism he could carry. Black vs. Asian, Soledad caught square in the middle, and the representative from her side doing very little representing.

She prayed, quietly, to herself, for something to transport her from the situation.

The thing about prayers: Occasionally they get answered.

Quick, violent, the ground shook. Shook so much the assembled group had to spread their arms, sway to maintain balance. Could have been an earthquake, but it was too severe and over too fast. It was more like an explosion. The screams that followed the thunderclap of noise would make you think so.

Typical LA: People ran toward the panic, not away from it. There'd be death and mangled bodies to see, but only if you were in the front row.

Soledad ran too, but with a different purpose: to save lives if she could. To help. To do… something. Lesker was behind her, but all he got was farther behind.

Olive Street.

Pushing through the crowd, the gawkers, Soledad saw: not an explosion. In the middle of the boulevard the ground had split open, collapsed. A sinkhole that swirled thick, dark and dirty. A collision of earth and water. On each side of the hole—it was a chasm stretching sidewalk-to-sidewalk, probably as deep below the churning water—LA traffic stopped dead, a parting like the Red Sea between cars. That meant down there in the pit…

Chaos. Confusion. People trying to get away. People trying to get close. Screams and the ever-present heat. A wall of faces, each registering its own response to the disaster.

To the crowd: "Get back! Everybody move back! Lesker!"

Lesker, just hitting the scene. The short run had turned his uniform a sweaty dark blue. If he said anything back to Soledad, it was lost under the hard huffs of his overworked lungs.

"Get these people away from here! Get on a radio, we need EMS and Rescue to go down for survivors!"

Survivors?

Soledad looked into the hole. A main had broken. That was obvious. It'd turned the ground above it to near liquid that raged in a soil river through the Red Line tunnels below the boulevard.

Survivors?

There were only the dead, and they were probably washed halfway to Santa Monica by now.

"Officer!"

"Come on, move back. You've got to clear—"

"Hey, Officer!"

Pushing through the crowd, a guy in a worker's uniform. The patch sewn to his shirt: MTA.

Soledad grabbed him, pulled him close."You work this site? Were you down there?"

"Yeah, I—"

"How many men down there?"

"Nobody. We were on break and—"

"Is there an access tunnel? Any way to get to the cars?"

"There are no cars. That's what I'm saying: There's nobody down there."

The constant throb of adrenaline that made reacting easy made thinking hard. Soledad forced herself to understand."The traffic…"

The MTA man carefully, clearly painted the picture."I'm standing there on the corner, we're on break like I said. Just come up out of the tunnel, me and my crew. We're standing there, and all of a sudden the traffic it… it splits up, you know? Those cars back there stopped." He pointed to the vehicles that rimmed the sinkhole."Every one of them stopped where they were."

"Stopped why?"

"Just did. They stopped, and the ones in front kept moving. I'm standing there looking at it thinking, ain't that queer: the cars stopping. I'm thinking just that, then the ground opens up."

Soledad looked at the hole. No workmen down there. She looked at the cars lined up to one side or the other of the sinkhole, but none—not one—where the ground had split.

She repeated the engineer's words to herself: Ain't that queer?

"It's like…" The engineer thought of something new to add to the obvious."It's like a—"

"A miracle," Soledad finished for him. A miracle. Like that gas explosion on the news that had injured no one. Like that little girl who survived getting hit by the car.

Miracles.

Miracles don't just happen.

Her eyes to the faces, the limitless faces in the crowd. Her hand to her gun. Looking. Looking. Endless expressions: horror, fear, shock, alarm, excitement. Expressions, expressions, expressions… then nothing. No expression. One face that was blank. One face that was placid. One face that was perfectly calm because it knew no one was hurt. It knew of miracles.

Soledad pushed through the crowd toward the face: a woman wrapped in a heavy overcoat. Too heavy for the ninety-plus-degree LA day.

The woman saw Soledad coming, surging for her. The woman smiled some, turned away and walked.

"Hold it!" Soledad swam, fought through the crowd.

The woman didn't have to fight or shove. She seemed to just float away.

"Stop, police!" Hand on her gun, too many people to pull it out.

The woman, in the open, gaining distance. She walked, but somehow moved faster than a leisured pace. Quicker than her casual steps would seem to carry her.

One arm before her, Soledad swatted aside the gawkers, their attention having shifted from the victimless sinkhole onto her."Move!" The people moved, not nearly enough."Move!"

Tripping, stumbling out into the open, Soledad saw the woman getting farther away. Soledad fought herself upright, raced forward.

Gun out, she hit an intersection.

A car horn, the skid of tires.

Soledad one-handed herself over the hood of the Ford that almost took her out, hit the pavement, rolled, kept moving. Eyes on the woman, eyes dead on the woman.

Up the boulevard the woman slowed, turned. Still smiling; warm, gentle. Fearless. She had nothing to fear. Hands to her coat, she peeled it open and let it fall away.

Soledad stopped cold. She had thought that in her studies, in her research, in the files and documents she'd poured over year by year, she had seen every metanormal, every freak and mutie known.

She had never seen this.

The woman—white of skin. Somehow golden of tone—free of her coat, spread wide a pair of feathered wings.

The gasp, from Soledad, from the crowd well behind her, was audible.

And then the woman was in the air. She didn't leap up or beat her wings, she quite simply raised for the sky.

Recovered, Soledad gave a final warning: "Police, stop!"

The woman sailed on upward.

With her gun, Soledad took aim. One shot she would get. One poor shot at the flying woman gliding farther and farther away. Two-handed grip, finger on the trigger… Squeeze.

Bang.

In the air the near speck that was the flying woman shook, faltered. Rose again. Then sank.

Soledad marked the trajectory and ran for it as the figure twisted, tumbled, spiraled to the ground. To the hard dirty pavement.

Soledad was there, gun extended, ready to shoot. The scars on her neck were a reminder that muties don't go down easy. She eased up to the woman stretched out on the boulevard. Not dead. Not yet. But in no shape to do damage.

With her foot Soledad rolled the woman to her back, as much as she could with those wings—mangled, snapped now. She was bleeding hard, but with her complexion so naturally white the loss was hard to calculate.

The woman looked to Soledad, still smiling. Different than before. Still warm, but something else now. Forgiving.

Behind her, sucking air hard and dripping sweat, Lesker came running. He looked at the woman, her wings. To Soledad: "Jesus Christ! You shot an angel!"

"She's not an angel. Angels don't bleed. She's just another freak."

Lesker had too much disbelief to hear any of that. He knew what he saw and reported it to Soledad one more time."You shot a fucking angel!"

It's hard at first. Sort of. Balancing the law with what's right. The law tends to be dear. What's right is gray, if it's even in that much contrast.

A guy climbs a fence onto land marked no trespassing, it's wrong. Guy climbs a fence onto land marked no trespassing to pull someone who's drowning out of a lake, he did wrong to do right.

That's the simple version of things.

A guy's walking down the street, crowded street—civvies, old women, kids. And this guy's walking along with a loaded gun; out in the open, finger on the trigger. What do you do? You treat him like the pope? Offer him a foot massage? What you do is you act like he's a potential criminal. A probable killer. You protect those people on the street any way you have to, up to and including putting a bullet in the guy. It's the right thing. Now, let's say this guy isn't just carrying a loaded weapon. Let's say he is a loaded weapon. Let's say he might not just take out a couple of people on the street, let's say he could take out every single person on the entire block, half the city… You going to be any more gentle with that guy than the guy sporting the gun? Hell if I think so. And every freak there is, is nothing but a loaded weapon looking to release. And maybe, sometimes, because you're human, you question: Is this, is what we do, right? Then you think of the guy on the street with the gun. The law says take him out. Common sense says take him out. So what do we do? We take them out.

Thing is, clear as all that is, obvious as it is, you get the liberals and the heart bleeders going on about what's right; about people's rights.

As if freaks are people to begin with.

Declaration of Independence says people are created equal. Freaks are as unequal as it gets. So, no, they don't get treated the same as we do. And while the contingent that's soft on freaks always want to talk rights,

somebody else's got to go out and protect theirs. They've got a right not to get run over by a drunk driver. They've got a right not to get dragged into an alley and raped three times, and a right to fly to Grandma's without the nut of the week jacking their plane. They've got a right not to get killed 'cause one freak that claims it's trying to protect us from another freak knocks over the building they work in. End of the day, only right that matters is the right to life. Sometimes, here in the real world, to keep that right, somebody's got to give up some of theirs. And if you think otherwise… you've never stared down a superhuman who could end your life easy as drawing a short breath. Once you have, right becomes very simple to you. Gray separates into black and white.

Quiet.

Mostly.

Other than the sound of metal scraping metal, like steel leaves rustling—generated by chains that hung from the rafters—the loft, the building, deserted, was quiet. The metal was for Aubrey. Toys. Things to play with. The solitude was for Vaughn. Being isolated let Vaughn think. Freely think. Vaughn picked up thoughts from people without even concentrating. In a crowd, the thoughts of others were always with him—a radio, volume turned low, that could never be shut off. It was constant. Constant. Constant. Enough to drive a guy…

A lesser guy…

And that was the thing. For Vaughn, for the ones like him: They couldn't turn the volume off, but they could turn it up. Standing as much as a mile away from someone, to Vaughn their thoughts became pictures. A book of faded photographs for him to leaf through. Less distance than that, the faded pictures became crystal-clear images. Sense memories, complete with taste and touch and smell.

And Vaughn could touch back. At little more than half a mile from someone he could make subtle suggestions, the mind he touched feeling nothing more than a whim—Gee, I think I'll buy a lotto ticket today. Say, why don't I call my old college roommate? Hell yeah, I'm not going to work; the beach is where I ought to be— to be used or discarded as the person Vaughn coaxed saw fit.

But closer, a quarter mile, less than that… At that distance? At that distance Vaughn could make another mind his own. At that distance suggestions became orders, hints were commands: strong, forceful. Undeniable. At that distance, for Vaughn's kind, there was nothing they couldn't do to someone.

More than that.

Nothing they couldn't force someone to do to himself.

Aubrey was coming.

A minute and a half later Aubrey came through the door. Haltingly. Tentative. Overly quiet. Something was wrong. Aubrey had done something wrong. Vaughn sensed it. Heightened perception wasn't hardly needed. Aubrey carried himself like a kid who'd messed up. Literally like a kid.

Vaughn, to himself: Jesus.

Aubrey was slow. For Vaughn, to put it that way, was being kind. Honest? Aubrey was just about retarded. Always he had to be watched over, minded. Especially in public. Aubrey couldn't help himself from touching, playing with metal. He couldn't help himself from doing things with metal. Things that could get him noticed and things that could get him killed. But Aubrey did, despite, maybe even because of his slowness and his need for attention, make a good companion for Michelle. There was no limit to her patience and affection, and Aubrey could use all he could get. And through Michelle, because of Michelle, because of what Michelle could bring out in him, Vaughn had come to tolerate Aubrey. To feel the need to share the responsibility of taking care of him.

Most times he felt the need.

But at times like this when Aubrey was distraught and troubled, but silent as a child with a bad secret, Vaughn was taxed to his relatively low limit. And at times like this Vaughn thought of Michelle and forced himself, as Aubrey came through the door, to be gentle as he could.

"Hey, Aubrey. What's up?"

"… Noth… I…"

"C'mon, man. Something's up."

Aubrey didn't say anything.

"Something's the matter. You know I know, so just tell me."

Aubrey kept up his quiet.

Less than a minute. Already Vaughn's patience was worn beyond thin. It'd be so much easier to slip into Aubrey's mind—Aubrey's mind would be nothing but easy to slip into—and extract whatever he cared to know, affect Aubrey and make him happy or sleepy or anything else that'd give Vaughn another couple hours of peace and God-loving quiet.

Except Vaughn didn't do that; didn't coax. Not with his own kind. A rule. One those who're gifted adopted a long time ago. One Vaughn, even now, stuck to. Vaughn just sucked a deep breath and tried again.

"Aubrey… Aubrey, you do something wrong? That what happened?"

"… Yes."

Yes. A word. It was a start.

"Tell me 'bout it."

"Can't."

Look at him, Vaughn thought. Scared. Squirming where he stood like if he didn't pee, his bladder was going to bust. That wasn't how adults behaved. This was a waste of time. So much easier to just…"Course you can. You can tell me anyth—"

"You'll get mad."

"I won't."

"You'll get mad and hurt people."

"Damn, man. I'm not gonna hurt you."

Aubrey made a noise: "Unnnnnnnn."

"Aubrey!"

"I'm sorry, Vaughn." All of a sudden Aubrey's eyes got wet. All of a sudden tears spilled out and ran over his cheeks, ran streaks through the dirt that pancaked his face. Aubrey's face and skin,

Vaughn's too, were perpetually dirty. Hard to keep clean when you live like a pack rat. Except Michelle. Michelle seemed always clean. Michelle seemed—

A long pause full of fear, then: "… Michelle…"

Years of living with his abilities. Vaughn, attuned to the subtle, was nearly blind to the obvious. Michelle never went anywhere without Aubrey. The opposite was also true. But here was Aubrey. Alone.

"Where's Michelle? What happened to Michelle?"

A daze settled over Aubrey."My fault. Shoulda been me," he chanted."Shoulda been."

Vaughn's mind went sharp as a switchblade, tore into Aubrey, dissected and cut and ripped away images: Olive Street. A sinkhole. Lives saved by Michelle's gift of grace.

Vaughn hacked deeper into Aubrey's memory. A cop and a gun and a shot fired. Michelle hit. Michelle hurt. Michelle tumbling through the air. Falling like a rock. Falling…

Michelle…

Minds locked, Vaughn/Aubrey screamed.

Vaughn pulled himself out of Aubrey's head.

Aubrey sank to the floor. Blood leaked freely from his nose, covered his jaw.

Vaughn swayed, buckled. He'd absorbed more than just recollections. He got everything Aubrey had seen and heard. Hours after the fact, and he'd been where Aubrey'd been: Hidden in a crowd on a hot street in the center of LA, he'd stood and watched Michelle, watched his wife get killed.

No.

Murdered.

Feeble in voice as he was in body: "Tell me."

"It's my fault," Aubrey sobbed through the hands that clutched at his nose."It's—"

"Goddamn it, tell me, or I'll go back inside."

"No, Vaughn." Aubrey wrapped his arms around his head as if that'd protect him; as if that'd keep Vaughn from shredding his mind again."I'll tell you! I'll tell! She… she wanted to go out. You were gone, and, and she wanted to go out."

"I told you never to—"

"I know. I know, but I couldn't help it. She wanted to, and, and I couldn't help it."

Vaughn knew he couldn't have refused Michelle either, sirenlike as she was angelic. Vaughn'd never been able to act contrary to Michelle's graces, so what willpower could a mess like Aubrey have in reserve against her?

"Michelle, Michelle didn't like being all inside all the time. She didn't like it. Michelle liked to be outside. She liked, you know, she liked people."

Past tense. It made Vaughn's stomach retch, his head swim.

"We went walking. We went walking 'cause… 'cause Michelle liked to, liked to, uh, liked to go out and be good to people." Aubrey sputtered on the blood that ran down into his mouth. He wiped it from his upper lip. It was freshly replaced."She got this, like, drug woman to not, not to be on drugs anymore. And, and there was this guy who was in a, uh, gang who just about got shot but didn't. And then… and then…"

An image from Aubrey's mind."The sinkhole," Vaughn said.

"We were on… on this one street…"

"Olive Street…"

"And she got that look, you know? That look of… pre…"

Precognition. Vaughn knew the look. One split second of anxiety in anticipation of death, disaster. One moment of radiant glow as she… what did she do? What other way was there to say it? Michelle made miracles happen.

"And then there was this police lady there. And, and she sees Michelle, and she… I don't know, but she knows something's not… she knows something's bad. And the police lady started chasing Michelle. But Michelle, she didn't care. She wasn't worried."

Why should she be? No one could hurt Michelle. No one would ever—

"And the police lady's chasing Michelle and she's chasing her and… and Michelle tried to fly away. Right in the middle of the street she tried to fly away… and then… and then…" Aubrey lost it, broke out in heaves and tears.

Didn't matter. Vaughn didn't need the story finished. He'd seen it. Michelle, mortally wounded, left to bleed like a rabid dog put down in the middle of the street. He knew people'd gathered and gawked and stared and pointed and taken pictures and said: "They did it, they got another freak." That's what waited for the ones who were careless or reckless. Or worse, it's what waited for those who couldn't just stand idle when people needed help; went into action putting out a fire with a single huffed breath or yanking a child from the path of a runaway truck at hyperspeed, doing so, revealing themselves for what they really were. Vaughn thought for certain it's what one day—too thoughtless, too distracted around metal— would happen to Aubrey. It's what he never thought, could let himself think, would happen to Michelle.

A wave of despair spilling over him; Aubrey could feel, vividly, the hole in Vaughn's soul. An empty pit into which he slid.

"Vaughn, please… don't… They'll… the rest of them'll get mad!"

"Fuck them! They want us to hide, they want us to wait. Then they let… they let Michelle…"

"… Vaughn…"

"They killed my wife."

A block away, a homeless man cried uncontrollably.

"Vaughn, don't do nothing. Please don't."

Clumsily Vaughn took Aubrey in his arms and held him. Vaughn was no good at expressing himself with touch. Tender, firm, harsh: shades that were beyond him. Michelle understood that about Vaughn. Michelle forgave him that: his aversion to physical contact. It was poor tribute to her that Vaughn even bothered trying with

Aubrey. But he did, he tried, and what Vaughn couldn't do with his hands he did with his mind. He calmed and reassured and then, with a gentle thought, he made Aubrey weary and sent him into what amounted to a restless, agitated sleep.

Vaughn stayed awake. He had so much to consider now that he had nothing left to live for.

Whump whump, thwap, thump-thwap.

Wasn't much going on.

There wasn't much going on in Soledad's life since her last OIS, since she'd gotten herself stuck back on a desk doing paperwork, back to being a secretary with a gun. And the gun might only be temporary.

Thwap, thwap thwap! Whump! Whump!

There wasn't much going on in the gym at Parker Center. No other cops around and Soledad was just fine with that. No noise, no chatter.

No… looks. Seemed like she'd been getting more and more… looks.

No sounds except her hands and feet doing work on a heavy bag.

Whump! Whump! Thwap whump!

Maybe there was something else she could do, she thought. Some other way to earn her keep. It was—felt like it was—coming to that. Obviously the cop thing was going nowhere. Maybe if she got out of all this halfway clean, if IA didn't bury her too deep, let her quit instead of getting discharged, she could… she could what? Work security at Century City Mall? Join Edison or ADT, drive around Beverly Hills scaring away the blacks and Mexicans every time Mr. and Mrs. Stuffy McNervouspants put in a call they'd seen one of those people in the neighborhood.

Yeah. Like she could keep sane living that way.

But what do you do when you've spent most of your life gearing up to take on ultra-empowered, supernormal genetic mutants and in the first six months it doesn't work out and doesn't work out as much as something can?

Thump, thump thwap. Whap!

Soledad liked the feel of fist and foot against the leather of a bag. Beyond that, she wasn't much of a fighter, having previously been in only one brawl in her entire life. Sixth grade. Maggie Pearson had stolen Soledad's Miami Vice poster from her locker. Nobody touched Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas and got away with it. Nobody.

Years later Soledad had studied—had taken—some kung fu classes, or classes the guy who taught them called kung fu because kung fu sounded cooler than self-defense, which is what he was really peddling. During one of the classes some guy, another student who thought he was the next Jet Li, connected a foot to Soledad's head. Soledad connected a fist to the center of his face. Okay, so maybe twice in her life she'd been in a fight. Sort of twice. One punch and the guy went down like a two-dollar whore.

Whump, whump whump! Thwap…

Soledad wound up for a spin kick. Anger, rage, frustration; she was going to let it all out. She was going to let somebody have it even if it was just a dumb punching bag that was good for nothing but being strung up and getting the stuffing knocked out of it.

She related.

Halfway into the spin, a voice: "Knee in."

The voice, unexpected, threw Soledad. Her foot struck late, missed the bag. Momentum kept carrying her around, would've taken her to the floor if she hadn't somehow steadied herself. The speed with which she recovered her balance was a bit surprising. Pleasantly.

Soledad looked to the voice.

The voice had come from Detective Tashjian, Internal Affairs Division.

Tashjian said again: "Knee in. You have to keep your knee in, thrust out, strike at the last second. You can't telegraph your blows."

He was giving tips? Tashjian, looking like a" before" shot from a Gainers Fuel ad?" And you're the fight authority."

Tashjian threw a couple of tight punches in the air and wasn't at all clumsy about it. He threw them like maybe he wasn't just a bland-as-bland-gets geek. He threw them like maybe at some point in the past pugilism was Tashjian's stock-in-trade. Probably. That was Tashjian: a guy who looks like nothing, but who's nothing but trouble.

"You have to hide your blows," Tashjian directed."Hide them, deliver them fast and plentiful at the last possible second so your opponent doesn't know which way to turn. All they can do… well, all they can do is be beaten. Take the beating that's coming to them."

"That your creepy metaphor for the day?"

"I'm talking about the martial arts. What are you talking about, O'Roark?"

At the moment Soledad wasn't talking about anything. She was pulling off her gloves, unwrapping her wrists.

"Keep trying to tell you I'm not a bad sort, O'Roark. Not like you think I am." Tashjian crossed to the heavy bag, tapped it with a finger as if to check its constitution, then pocketed his hands."Only doing my job."

"So am I. Difference is I get strung up for it."

"There are just questions that need to be asked. You can understand that, can't you? Most cops go their entire careers without drawing their side arms, without being in an officer-involved shooting. Now in the past few months you've been involved in two."

"I was on MTac. We're supposed to shoot freaks."

"A probee, by herself, with some kind of homegrown weapon takes out a pyrokinetic."

"He was about to—"

"An officer, by herself," Tashjian continued, uncaring for anything Soledad had to say,"shoots a… well, whatever it was."

"This last shooting was righteous. You know that. For crying out loud, I used a service revolver. The department wouldn't even let me carry a nine."

"Question is: Should you have taken the shot at all? Procedure would have been for a uniformed officer to make the call to MTac."

"It was flying away. Flying! By the time I'd put in a call, by the time MTac responded, the thing would've been setting up shop in Idaho. Lucky I got one shot off."

"You made it count."

"And good for it. The thing just opened up a hole in the middle of Olive."

Rocking on his heels: "Not so sure about that. Times says—"

"Christ. The Times."

"You're telling me."

"Then why you always talking about the Times?"

"Usually one laying around Starbucks. For free, what does it hurt to hear what the liberals are saying? They're saying the freak might've saved people from being trapped in the hole."

"And Fox News says the gov ought to federalize the MTacs."

"Handing MTac to the bureaucrats." From Tashjian, a shake of the head."God help us all if they do."

"In the meantime I do my job; I see a freak, I stop a freak."

"There are any number of reasons for pulling a trigger. Stop a crime, commit a crime. Grab a few headlines."

"I'm trying to make a name for myself, that what you're saying?"

Tashjian's head dipped slightly, signifying agreement.

"That's a guy thing: buying fame with a gun," Soledad said."It doesn't come from women."

"What about Solanas?"

"Who?"

"Valerie Solanas."

Soledad blank-faced him.

"The woman who shot Andy Warhol."

"Who?"

Tashjian's head lolled."How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven. Just turned."

"And you don't know… You're serious." Tashjian's hands came out of his pocket, rubbed his forehead.

Soledad thought she was giving him a headache. Soledad smiled.

Tashjian: "Warhol was an artist. Painted soup cans."

Soledad went back to giving blank face.

"Trust me, he was big. Big for an artist anyway. So Solanas shoots him, trying to carve out her own little piece of history."

"She should've shot somebody more famous."

"Fifteen minutes."

"What's that?"

"In the future everyone will be famous, but for only fifteen minutes."

"I believe that."

"Warhol said it."

Soledad thought for a moment, considered, then quite plainly: "Looks like he was right."

Tashjian cut loose with a broad and appreciative grin."I like you, O'Roark."

"Like a snake likes a mouse."

"Like a mongoose likes a snake." He fed himself a stick of Big Red. Even over the stink of sweat, Soledad could catch the scent of its spice."Maybe you've got to go down, but you don't go down easy."

"Or maybe I won't go down at all."

"Nope. Not one bit easy." Tashjian flicked the heavy bag, not hard, but he made it move. Very little, but it did move."And I like that."

"By the way," Tashjian said as he walked toward the gym door,"I've met your lawyer, that Senna woman. Tough gal. And I mean that as a compliment."

"Sure you do."

On his way out: "Good luck to you, O'Roark. I'd miss you if you weren't around."

In the time he'd been her SLO, little as it was, Soledad had learned almost nothing about Bo, his civilian life. Cops tended to be private people. MTacs the most so. All Soledad'd learned about Bo came from watching the guy. Everybody knew to keep an eye on him because when you first hit the academy and people find out you wanted to put in for MTac, they'd tell you things. Things besides you're crazy and you'd better have good insurance. They'd tell you about certain BAMFs: cops you want to keep an eye on, learn from if you've got any desire to live past thirty. Bo had made it that far plus ten.

So Soledad looked for Bo, found him, watched him and got schooled.

She saw Bo on a target range, always sporting a Colt. 45. Always deadly accurate with it even at distances some would be off target with a scoped rifle. She learned: Take your time, don't rush a shot just to take a shot. Make every squeeze of the trigger count because with freaks, usually, one shot is all you get.

If.

She saw Bo with other officers: always cool, always in control. He projected authority. Easy to do when people looked up to you anyway; when the rest of the cops on the force think you're just shy of being a legend. But you don't get that kind of status for nothing. You buy it by putting down a total of twenty-three freaks. Putting them down and living to brag about it.

Except Bo didn't brag. He didn't much talk about the things he'd done. He was the polar opposite of Yarborough. Where Yar had a tale to tell about every call he'd ever been on, all Bo ever had to say in confirmation of any of his exploits was: "Well, now, I guess so."

And Soledad had seen Bo in action and under fire. Just once. Once was enough to confirm everything else she'd seen, heard about the man was real and true. He was strong and tough and confident. Just about impossible to kill. And he was there for Soledad when Soledad needed him the most. Life in the balance, she'd looked up and seen him standing with a smoking gun in his hand. A dead freak by her side.

She'd seen all that, but what she had not seen, what she never thought she would see-… when she followed a little sound—an odd, rapid, quivering breathing—to a corner by a towel Dumpster in the locker room, what she saw was Bo crying.

Bo looked up at Soledad. Three words he managed.

"Reese," Bo said,"is dead."

Just about the last person Ian expected to see when he opened his door—other than Elvis or Hitler—was Soledad. Since their antidate date they'd gone out a couple more times. Similar circumstances. Places where they could be together but not intimate. They'd talked on the phone. Infrequently. And rarely about anything specific to either of them. Only being very generous about things could they claim their relationship was moving—crawling— in a direction which could be considered forward.

Now here she was, just… showing up.

Not knowing what else to say, Ian said: "Hey."

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah. Come in."

Soledad did, then she and Ian stood around just inside the door of his apartment. Ian didn't press Soledad, he just let her stand there. Would've let her stand there until natural causes ended her life, if that's what she wanted. For Soledad, from Ian, anything.

When she was ready to talk, Soledad said: "A friend of mine died."

Ian delayed some, then said: "Oh."

Incredulous: "Oh? I tell you someone dies and you say 'Oh'?"

"I haven't seen you in how long? You show up, you tell me someone died. I don't know what this person—"

"She."

"I don't know what she," Ian adjusted,"means to you—"

"Meant. She's dead."

"Soledad!" A quick, exasperated flare, but exasperation would do

Ian no good. Patience. Compassion. As much of it as he could dig up: That's what he needed.

Taking Soledad by the hand, lightly, Ian led her into the living room and sat her down. A black leather couch, a big-screen TV, a coffee table that was used as a place to rest feet and beers. A drafting table where he did his… industrial design, Soledad made herself remember. Not much else. A very" guy" setup, if Soledad had been in a frame of mind to care.

Ian asked her if she wanted something to drink, water or stronger.

She shook her head.

Ian: "I don't know what to say. I know next to nothing about you. I know less about your friend. Why me? Why are you coming to me for…? Why not your friends, your parents?"

"I'm not much closer to my parents than I am to strangers. And… I don't have friends."

"Come on, you don't have—"

"People I know, acquaintances… I don't have friends."

Ian thought about their relationship to that point, about himself and how distant he liked to remain from people. Yeah. Probably Soledad didn't have friends.

"I've spent so much time pushing people off, there's no one left to let in."

"But the woman who died…"

"I looked up to her. I admired her. She saved my life, so I call her a friend."

"And me, I'm just around by default? I get to be your friend because no one else wants the job?"

"Because you'll sit and listen and won't ask questions, and maybe want to know more than I tell you, but won't press me to find out any more than just what I say. You care about me, Ian. You care enough to take what little I give you and leave the rest. I need someone like that in my life."

"What good is any of that for me?"

"You get someone who won't ask questions back. Much as you keep from me, isn't that how you want it?"

Ian felt as if he'd just been walked through a blueprint for disaster."It can't work. We can't make a relationship out of secrets."

"We might as well try. Other than that we're just two people keeping secrets alone."

It was Ian who needed the drink. The kitchen. All the liquor he had was some Jack Daniel's coolers. Two of them. He drank one, drank the other and he felt nothing more than a mild change in climate.

Ian went back to Soledad, sat with her. For a while they shared their special brand of nontalk.

A little way into that Ian said: "I've had a lot… not a lot, but too many friends who've died and most of them have died in not-too-nice ways."

He paused, gave Soledad the opportunity to ask about that; about his friends dying.

She didn't. She just accepted what he'd told her.

For Ian, how their relationship of don't ask/don't tell might work came into focus a little.

Continuing: "The last time it happened I had to… I went to a psychologist. I thought I needed some help."

"What'd he tell you?"

"Basically I had to get over it. I had to forget. You dwell on the loss, and you can never put it behind you. The best thing to do is just put it all out of your mind."

Soledad didn't even take time to consider the advice."Sounds like bullshit."

Ian laughed a little."Yeah. That's what I thought. One visit to the guy: That's all I bothered with."

"My dad never thought much of therapy. I'm from Wisconsin, you know."

"No. I didn't."

"I am. My dad said therapy was for screwed-up city people. And white people. Black people weren't allowed to whine. And in Wisconsin you got a problem, you go out, you do yard work, you come back in and you're too tired to have problems anymore."