Almost there.
Zoe kicked at the perimeter around the hole, loosening and clearing as much debris as possible. Then she ran back from the wall, turned and launched into a full-speed sprint toward the damaged wall. A few feet before impact, Zoe angled her shoulder forward and leaped off her feet. She felt her body’s impact with the concrete: first her shoulder, then her face, then her ribs and arms.
When she blinked, she was face-first on the ground, dust and grime covering her. More importantly, cool air and the sounds of sirens. From behind, a voice screamed out. “Zoe! I need your help!”
Jamie. And the stunned man.
Bloody handprints planted on the ground, and as Zoe pushed herself up, she coughed and spit, her body rejecting soot and debris. “Zoe! Come on!”
She craned to look back at the person-sized hole in the concrete, jagged rebar edges and crumbled pieces scattered around. Inside, Jamie dragged the stunned man, arms around his chest and pulling with each step.
Zoe stood up and stumbled forward, leg catching on the bottom of the punctured hole in the building wall. She hopped over debris, then waved Jamie away. Though she was sore—in some places, screaming with pain—carrying him out while injured was still easier than the whole “smashing through a wall” thing she somehow decided was a good idea. They cleared the broken threshold, and Zoe set the man down.
Jamie immediately collapsed next to him, coughing. “Well,” he said in between coughs and spasms, “nice to meet you, Zoe.”
Zoe pushed her fingers through her hair and knelt down beside the two men. She tried to laugh, but each breath felt heavy and thick.
“Hey.” Jamie pulled himself up to his knees with a groan. “Promise I’m not trying to be a villain here, okay? But hear me out.”
Fatigue and pain made it easy for Zoe to drop her natural skepticism. “What’s that?”
“I should erase his memory.” He tapped the stunned man on the shoulder. “Even though he was having a breakdown, he might remember something about you or me.”
“Will it...will it hurt him?”
“No, he’ll just have a gap. I’ll leave it at the point when there are a few people in the meeting and they know there’s a fire and that’s it. Ian will probably tell him later he was having a panic attack. Between that and the smoke and the stress, he probably won’t even notice.” They met eyes, and one quick look of approval later led to Jamie doing some weird finger waving. The man didn’t flinch, didn’t convulse, didn’t give any sort of reaction. He simply sat, and then a few moments later, Jamie looked back over and said, “That’s it. It’s done. Let’s bring him up front so the EMTs can take care of him.” Zoe scooped him up rescue-style with her arms but Jamie quickly waved it off. “No, we gotta make it look good. You’re not the Throwing Star, remember?”
They shared a laugh, something that would have felt impossible an hour ago, then propped up the man between them, his arms each over a shoulder. A sharp observer would have noticed that she supported all of his weight as Jamie merely framed his other side, and that the man’s feet floated a few inches above the ground. She carried the load at full speed until they emerged from the alley to flashing red lights and the loud water pumps of fire engines. “Hey!” Jamie yelled. “This man needs help!”
Ian saw them and flagged more EMTs to run their way.
“He’s in shock,” Jamie said through huffs. “He had a panic attack. And the smoke, or stress or whatever. He seems unresponsive right now, but I think he needs just a few minutes.”
EMTs wheeled over a stretcher; latches clanged and clacked, and the air filled with medical speak as they checked him over. Though Jamie had gone a long way to earning some level of trust, Zoe still lingered just long enough to hear the EMTs pronounce the man’s vitals as steady and stable.
The Mind Robber kept his word.
And suddenly, those moments of chasing him down seemed a little different.
* * *
As two firefighters passed by, one commented about how a blown transformer on its own shouldn’t cause such a big fire, not at that speed. The other said it looked like the building’s old wood structure probably didn’t help, though its earthquake retrofit with concrete had kept the whole thing from toppling down.
Blown transformer. Did that explain the flashing blue and sudden blackouts? An hour had passed, and while the danger of the fire was mostly gone now, the burnt stench lingered in the air. Combined with the incoming bay fog and light rain overhead, the whole place became a stew of all the worst smells. Jamie adjusted on the bus stop bench he shared with Zoe as they watched the firefighters. Lights from police cars brought flashes of blue into the mix, though there looked to be a plainclothes officer helping out.
They hadn’t really said much during that time, mostly commenting as the firefighters and EMTs did their job—“true heroes,” Zoe called them—though they played up the adulation when Ian came by to thank them, before dropping back to tension just as quickly. Jamie didn’t think Zoe was going to break him in half or turn him in, though she had just thrown herself through a concrete wall. So she was probably a little impulsive.
“What’s it like?” Zoe suddenly asked.
“Huh?”
“Doing the...memory thing,” she said. She tugged on the blanket provided by the EMTs, eyes still forward. “What’s it like?”
“Well, it’s um...it’s kind of like watching a movie? You can fast-forward or rewind. Or pause.” He waved his fingers around. “Fingers help, they kind of act like controls. Like, um, swiping to move around. And delete.”
She finally looked at him, eyes wide but not combative like earlier. Instead, she leaned forward, the questions coming out at a much quicker clip. “Anything in their memory? Like even stuff from way back when?”
“As far as I can tell, as long as it’s in there, like if their brain is still capable of recalling it, I can access it. Sometimes it looks a little hazy and then it focuses.” Jamie broke eye contact, even though he could feel her gaze lingering. “But honestly, I try not to pry too much. You know, it’s creepy to do that. I usually just cover my tracks and that’s it.”
“Even yourself?”
Jamie’s muscles locked up. This had to be leading somewhere. While the fire and ensuing rescue had occupied their focus over the past few hours, there was no getting away from the original reason they were there. Or was it a trick? She had, after all, been chasing him. He weighed his options and realized that sitting next to someone with extraordinary speed and strength left very little margin for error. “Not myself,” he said, breaking the silence. “It’s like what you said about the wall. I’m like you. Who I was before two years ago, I’m not sure.”