“I can’t leave him,” I call out to Aldrick. He skids to a stop at the sound of my voice. He grabs my arm and pulls me behind him. “He’s not the one about to eat a bullet, hon.” I swallow down the gross feeling that I’m abandoning someone who tried to help me, and we run, following the whip of glass as it slinks back to its owner. A boy with dark skin steps out of the shadow, calling the glass back into his palm. I’ve heard of Vitrifases but have never seen one. He can convert the air around him into glass—that’s what knocked the lights out.
The Vitrifas—Theo—looks at the roof as Alanna jumps down, throwing her palms up once more. The hum is back—we’re shaded again. The boy called Theo lifts his hands, and a disc of blue glass sprouts and multiplies under Alanna’s feet, creating glass stairs down from the rooftop. She lands softly on the ground, hands still out, though they’re shaking. “I don’t have much left,” she says.
We run until we’re at the end of the alley, Alanna keeping one palm extended backward, covering us from sight. Before us is a wide street, the wires of streetcars crisscrossing over our heads. Town houses are pressed together in a smattering of different colors, and a bright blue bodega with a flickering fluorescent sign sits on the corner. This street is more open, and it looks like the theater on the other end of the street has just let out. There are dozens of people here. There’s no way Alanna can hide us from everyone.
I’m about to tell them to leave me, to run—when the sound of squealing tires cuts through the night. We turn as a white van rips around the corner, shrieking to a halt right in front of us. A girl opens the driver’s side door and hangs out the side, one arm on the wheel while the other grips the bike rack on the roof. Her long blue-black hair whips around her head in the windy night.
“Time to go!” she shouts, jumping out of the van.
“I’m losing—” Alanna’s words are lost as she faints. Theo catches her in his arms, and the shouts of the police officers behind us escalate as they see us.
The cop who cuffed me holds up her Taser and fires it at the driver.
Aldrick shouts as I jump forward, knocking the girl aside. The cop swears as we roll out of the way. I help her scramble up, and we both run to the van.
Theo rips open the van door while Aldrick runs back into the alleyway, throwing his arms out as he goes, his skin thundering back into stone.
He tips a dumpster on its side and lifts the other, stacking it until the alley is blocked. He turns, triumphant, smiling as he runs back to the van, his skin returning to normal. The police are trapped behind the barricade. It won’t take them long to get around it, but it’s bought us a couple of minutes.
Aldrick hops into the passenger seat. “Get in, Waterworks,” he says to me.
I don’t have a choice, and I know it.
I get in the van.
Seven
I sit in the back seat, wondering where the hell this whole night went so terribly wrong as the girl Aldrick calls Sapphira drives us through the streets, taking all the street signs more as suggestions than rules.
Theo and Alanna sit in the middle seat in front of me, her head cradled in his lap.
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask quietly, and he looks over his shoulder at me.
“She depleted herself trying to shade so many people at once,” he explains, looking at her. His glasses slide down his nose. He scrunches his nose to move the lenses up and eyes me with as much contempt as someone who just scrunched their nose can muster. A for effort, dude.
“She’d be better if we’d grabbed you at the bus station like I said,” Theo retorts, raising his voice, so I know he’s talking more to Aldrick and Sapphira than to me.
“The bus station?” I ask, my mind rewinding to earlier this evening. I can’t believe I was just on a bus this evening. It feels like years ago. I remember the feeling that someone was following me.
“That was you?” I ask, and anger seeps into my voice. “You scared the shit out of me.” I knew there was someone there.
“There are a lot of Oddities arriving in San Francisco. Dozens a week since the Stirring. You’re lucky we found you before someone else did,” Theo responds, brushing the hair gently out of Alanna’s face.
“The Stirring?” I ask. I already don’t like the sound of that. It’s like the title of a M. Night Shyamalan movie.
“Independence Day. Two years ago,” Aldrick says, shifting in his seat again.
Pinpricks slip up my spine.
“You know what I’m talking about then?” he asks, a smile inching onto his lips before I can think to adjust my expression.
It wasn’t just me. I knew it, but it’s weird to hear it from someone else out loud. It was the night I used my powers on my dad. I was never able to really get answers about it.
Does it even matter now? A small voice in the back of my mind asks.
I lean my head against the split vinyl seat. Someone’s drawn a burning queen of poisons flower on the inside roof of the van. It feels like a bridge too far. “Okay. Can you just let me out at the next light, please?”
They all turn to look at me, except Sapphira, who is eyeing me through the rearview mirror, her ice-blue eyes unreadable as we veer left . . . closer to the coast.
“That’s a hell of a ‘you’re welcome,’” Aldrick says, raising an eyebrow.
“I am not heading back to some secret headquarters for a revolution against the Wardens. I will take my chances with the police.”
Aldrick cocks his head to the side, his eyebrows knitting together as he looks at Theo.
“You’re planning a revolution, Theo?” he asks.
“Not that I was aware of, Aldrick. You, Sapphira?”
Sapphira pulls her eyes up from the road to look at Aldrick. A little smile plays on her lips as we pull up to a red light. “Always. But against the Wardens? No.”
She puts her clicker on to merge with another lane as we come up against a construction zone.
I point to the drawing above me. “No?”
Aldrick cranes his neck. “Ah. That. Well that is just a celebration of our freedom. The Wardens are gone.”
“Or they are biding their time. They’ve done it before.”
“Wow. They sure got you scared,” Aldrick replies.
“If you’re not scared of the Wardens, you’re an idiot,” I snap. “They’ve gone silent before. And when they came back, they didn’t take kindly to the people who defied them.”
I sound like my father as the words tumble out of my mouth.
“It’s different this time, darlin’,” Aldrick says turning to face front. “It’s a new day.”
Maybe he’s right. The fact that we can show our powers to humans now when we couldn’t before, does say something. Maybe the Wardens just decided to stop nailing queen of poisons flowers to doors. Maybe they stopped taking out those of us who pose a threat to our secrecy.
But even as I think those words, another refrain pulses at the base of my throat.
Unlikely.
“Damn,” Sapphira says as the traffic slows. I look out the window. Construction crews line the road. A huge wall of opaque sheeting dangles from a crane, blocking the work from view.