rise to avoid being trampled, and a girl, no more than ten or eleven years old, raced screaming by, swinging a machete at imaginary pursuers. The blade caught the side of Shade’s throat.
No pain, not at first, just shock as Shade pressed her hand to the wound and gaped as it came away red to the wrist.
She sank back on the ground, wanting to cry for help, wanting to call to her mother now, her mother who no longer cried her name.
Shade felt suddenly dizzy, woozy, feet and hands not working quite . . . She rolled onto her back and looked up at the cloudless sky. Strange. The sky. Blue. She felt the rhythmic pulsing of her lifeblood escaping the confines of her arteries.
She blinked. She thought the word Mom, and fell swirling down into unconsciousness.
Ten minutes later, Shade woke to find herself lying on a gurney, flashing lights everywhere, her vision blurred, head pounding, needles in her elbow, a blood-pressure cuff around her wrist, thick bandages around her throat. An EMT squeezed a bag of plasma to force the lifesaving fluid into Shade’s collapsing arteries. Shade, barely clinging to paralyzed, nightmarish consciousness, blinked furiously to clear her vision, and focused at last on a black plastic body bag. And on the gloved hand of the fireman pulling the zipper up.
Up and over her mother’s face.
| 1 | | | THE MEET CUTE |
“THE FIRST SUPERHERO was not Superman,” Malik Tenerife said to Shade Darby. “It was Gilgamesh. Like, four thousand years ago. Super strong, super smart, unstoppable in battle.” He raised a finger for each point.
“First name Gil, last name Gamesh?”
“That’s very cute, Shade. Pretty sure they were making that same joke four thousand years ago. Gilgamesh, baby: the first superhero.”
“Not going with Jehovah?”
“I don’t think gods count as superheroes,” Malik said.
“Mmmm. They do if they aren’t real gods,” Shade countered. “I mean, Wonder Woman is an Amazon, Thor is one of the gods of Asgard, and wasn’t Storm from X-Men some sort of African deity?”
Malik sat back, shaking his head. “You know, I kinda hate when you do that.”
“Do what?” Her innocent expression was not convincing and she didn’t really intend it to be.
“When you pretend not to know something and then kneecap me.” For a boy who supposedly hated it, he was smiling pretty broadly.
Shade laughed delightedly, something she rarely did. “But it’s so fun.”
His face grew serious and he leaned forward across the tiny table. “Are you really going to do this, Shade? You know it’s a felony, right? A federal crime? Worse, this is national security we’re talking about.”
Shade shrugged. They were at the Starbucks on Dempster Street, in Evanston, Illinois. It was busy, jammed with the usual early morning crowd—college kids, ponytail moms, two women in the fluorescent vests of road workers, high school kids like Shade, college kids like Malik, all breathing steam and tracking wet in on their shoes, all stoking the caffeine furnace.
It was noisy enough that they could talk without too much concern for being overheard, but Shade wished Malik had not used the word ‘felony’ because that was exactly the kind of word people had a tendency to overhear.
They sipped their drinks—grande latte for Malik, tall Americano with a little half-and-half for Shade—checked the time and left. Malik was a tall, lithe black boy, seventeen, with hair in loose ringlets that had a tendency to fall into his eyes, the endearing effect of which he was quite well aware. Those occasionally ringleted eyes were perpetually at half-mast as if to conceal the penetrating intelligence behind them. His expression at rest was benign skepticism, as if he was not likely to believe you, but would keep an open mind.
Shade was a seventeen-year-old white girl with auburn hair cut to give her the look of someone who might be inclined to curse, smoke weed and just generally be trouble. Only two of those things were true.
She had brown eyes that could range from amused and affectionate to chilly and unsettling—effects she deployed quite consciously. She was tall, five foot eight, and had the sort of bone structure that would have caused people to say, “Hey, you should be a model,” but for the impressive scar that ran just beneath her jaw on the right side and behind her ear and gave her a swashbuckling air. If there were ever a movie role for Blackbeard’s pirate niece, Shade would have been a natural for the part.
Shade was effortlessly charismatic, with a hint of something regal about her. But despite the charm and the cheekbones, Shade was not a popular kid at school. She was too bookish, too aware, too impatient, too ready to let people know she was smarter than they were. And beyond that, there was something about Shade that felt too old, too serious, too dark; maybe even something a bit dangerous.
Malik knew where that feeling of danger came from: Shade was obsessed. She was like some online game addict, but her obsession was with a very real event, with fear and death and guilt. And it was no game.
It was chilly out on the street, not real Chicago cold—that was coming—just chilly enough to turn exhalations to steam and make noses run. The little business section of Dempster—Starbucks, pizza restaurant, optometrist, seafood market, and the venerable Blind Faith Café—was just west of the corner with Hinman Avenue. Hinman—where Shade lived—was a street of well-tended Victorian homes behind deep, unfenced front lawns. Trees—mature elms and oaks—had already dropped many of their leaves, gold with green accents, on lawns, sidewalks, the street, and on parked cars, plastering windshields with nature’s art.
Shade and Malik walked together down to Hinman where the bus stop was. There were six kids already milling around.
“Well, I’ll see you, Shade,” Malik said. There was something off in the way he said it, a tension, a worry.
Shade heard that note and said, “Stop worrying about me, Malik. I can take care of myself.”
He laughed. He had an unusual laugh that sounded like the noise a hungry seal made. Shade had always liked that about him: the idiot laugh from such a smart person. Also the smile.
And also the feel of his arms and his chest and his lips and . . . But that was all past tense now. That was all over and done with, though the friendship remained.
“It probably won’t work,” Malik said.
“Are you rooting against me?” Shade asked archly.
“Never.” The smile. And a sort of salute, fist over heart, like something he’d probably seen on Game of Thrones. But it worked. Whatever Malik did it generally somehow worked.
“I’m going to do it, Malik. I have to.”
Malik sighed. “Yeah, Shade, I know. It’s called obsession.”
