1.3

“Hey, kid. You new around here?”

I’m sitting on a bench in the corner of the plaza, the one just outside of the city. Storefronts still pop up now and again around here, especially since it’s so close to the suburbs, but it’s also close to the more crime-ridden parts of the city, so they never last.

I look up from my lap. An older woman, thirty, maybe forty years old with pale skin has sat down next to me. Her face is indifferent. She puffs on a cigarette and blows it in the other direction.

“Uh. Yeah. Yes,” I stutter. Still trying to get used to my voice. I modified it to be slightly deeper, and it’s throwing me off.

The lady chuckles. “Adorable. You do know how close this place is to downtown, though, right? Hanging out alone is sorta risky.”

Yeah, that’s kinda the point. “Oh, uh. I guess.”

She levels a look at me. I’m pretty sure it reads pity. “It’s mostly just Cook that runs this area. He’s not usually violent, but you’re gonna run into his guys at some point if you stay here.” She takes another drag at her cigarette and looks away. “Are you staying here?”

She might think I’m homeless. I can work with this.

I deliberately pause, and then nod. “Yeah.”

I see her frown briefly as she turns back to me, but otherwise her face stays neutral. “Okay. Well, my name’s Ava. I work at the office a little ways down the street.” I don’t remember seeing an active office building anywhere nearby during my sweep, but she seems confident.

It takes me a second to realize she’s expecting a reply.

“Um – Alex.” I blurt out.

“Alright, Alex, listen. Cook’s guys aren’t really violent, but they can be a little rough. What do you say I take you around, introduce you?”

Wow, that was quick.

She must see some of the surprise on my face, but thankfully she misinterprets it. “C’mon, don’t be like that,” she says, smirking a little. “It’ll be fine.”

I wasn't expecting it to be quite this easy, to be honest. It’s been a while since I disguised myself, but somehow I was thinking it might take a couple days.

It’s not over yet though. I still need to make sure she doesn’t suspect me of anything. There’s no way she’d guess I have superpowers, but she might think I’m a fed or something.

First things first, can’t be too eager.

“That seems so unreasonably risky,” I reply, trying to inject some skepticism into my voice.

She chuckles. “Okay, fair. But, it’s not like that's much different from just waiting around for them.” Her face visibly shifts to a friendlier expression. “I know I’m probably not the most trustworthy, but it beats getting accosted by patchy thugs, right?”

I take a second, both to think and to sell the impression I’m trying to give off – nervous, indecisive, vulnerable. Ava isn’t necessarily wrong about her offer, but the way she’s phrased it and her general insistence lead me to believe she’s more connected to Mike’s Gang than she would want me to think.

Which is good. Ideally, I’ll be able to make my way up the ranks naturally, but in an emergency I can always try to get a picture of a higher-level member and disguise myself as them. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it wouldn’t need to be. All I need to do is find Cook, alert the authorities, and hold him there until they arrive. Without dying. Or being arrested.

So long as Ava doesn’t drag me into an alley and try to axe murder me, this is an ideal scenario.

I stare at the concrete path under our bench. “Sure,” I mutter, still trying to seem hesitant.

I see her smile out of the corner of my eye. “Good. Let’s go.” She stands, and motions for me to follow.

As I slowly pull myself up off the bench, I catch a glimpse of my… disguise in the reflection across the street.

The man in the reflection isn’t actually that much older than me, and actually a little shorter. He has thinner eyebrows, a stronger jaw, shorter, lighter hair. His eyes are smaller, and his face reads masculine in a way mine usually doesn’t.

I mean hey, if I have to look like someone else I might as well look handsome, right?

Apparently not. Usually I just feel apathetic looking at myself, but now it’s physically difficult. I turn away.

“You coming?” Right, dangerous unsanctioned drug bust. I nod and follow along.

The sun is sinking down towards the horizon at this point, and the surrounding buildings are cast in long shadows. The plaza isn’t typically super busy anyway, but especially now we only run into the occasional pedestrian.

As we walk out of the plaza and along a backstreet, Ava tries to start a conversation.

“So, any actual reason you were just hanging out so close to nightfall? People don’t usually do that, even in the suburbs,” she says casually.

I hesitate, unfortunately, but hopefully if I go with something believable enough she’ll let it go. “I, uh. Got kicked out.”

“Oh, yeah? What for,” she huffs, taking another drag of her cigarette.

“Liking boys,” I mutter. Believable, but false.

Ava winces. “Rough. Guess that’s why I’ve never seen you around here, right? You lived in a big fancy house over by the suburbs.”

“Mhm,” I reply, glancing around. We’re heading closer to the city, near some of the denser housing areas. It’s making me a little nervous.

The city’s dangerous on its best days.

We approach an apartment complex, looking a little run-down with stained concrete and rusted metal railings. Ava walks up and buzzes in. “Mikey, got a new one.” We wait outside for a minute, and she puts out her cigarette on the concrete wall.

Then, the door cracks open, and a pair of eyes dart across us. They’re high up, so their owner must be pretty tall, and they widen in recognition when they settle on Ava.

The door opens, and a large man with dark skin and a leather jacket ushers us inside. He doesn’t speak, and Ava doesn’t try to start any sort of conversation. We just follow him up a rusty set of stairs, up to the third floor, where he knocks on another door about halfway down. Number twenty-six.

I follow both of them into a small living room, scattered with magazines and someone’s phone laying on a coffee table surrounded by two couches. A smaller guy lounges on the far one.

He perks up when we walk into the room. The bigger guy, notably, closes the door behind us and stands near it.

I tense slightly.

“Is this him?” Small guy asks, fishing something out from under a nearby magazine and hopping up off his couch. He walks up close to me and leans over. I move back a little in response.

“Yeah,” Ava says, not seeming like she’s paying attention.

“Haven’t seen him around before,” small guy comments, glancing at Ava. She shrugs.

“Neither have I. Says he got kicked out. Y’know,” she says, waving her hand.

“That true?” Small guy says, turning back to me. I can tell he’s measuring my response.

I look down and fidget a little, trying to sell it. “Yeah.” I don’t really have to fake being uncomfortable, at least.

“Fine,” he says. He reaches a hand into his pocket and tosses something to Ava, which she catches. Then, before I can react, his other hand shoots up in front of my face, and I hear a sharp snap.

I jerk back as a potent salty-sweet smell floods my nostrils, coughing. My eyes burn and I start feeling a little dizzy, stumbling backwards. Faintly, distorted, I hear people still talking.

“Take him back where you found him, give him this and give him the speech, yeah? I got shit to do.”

“Fine. Dick.”

“Fuck off Ava, you know you need me.”

“I don’t need you, Mikey.”

There’s footsteps coming close to me now, I think, but it’s getting really hard to focus. Opening my eyes just reveals… well, the room, but not. The room but cracks of impossible light filter through the corners, and solid walls melt in every direction. Everything moves and distorts, colors change and grow, and I try to take a step forward and almost fall over.

This is miserable.

“C’mon, kid, let’s get you back to your bench.”

I feel someone speaking, and then I feel them lift my arm over their back and guide me out the door, down the stairs and onto the street. I think we take a different way in, but I’m not totally sure. Were there even stairs on the way we came in? I stumble down them anyway. Ava can’t seem to stop cursing under her breath.

The world gets even prettier when we hit open air. The vibrant, fiery orange of the sunset bleeds into the dark blues and blacks of long shadows cast by the tall buildings. We’re not quite in the city, but the structures still stretch into the sky.

I start to feel nauseous. I lean over.

“Oh you little bitch, don’t you dare puke on me —”

I hold it in. For Ava. She’s so nice. Is that toxic? It might be.

Ava hauls me along, and I don’t remember most of it, which is a shame, since she’s so nice. She mutters to me along the way.

“You’re high as fuck right now, but I know you’re gonna remember this, so —” she grunts.

 “So I’m gonna run through this once. Number one: you’re hooked on Stew now. EX-9? Seen that on the news or whatever? It’s Cook’s stuff, and there’s no getting out of it now. No cure, no rehab, no detox, nothing. But no worries, because guess what —” she grunts again, and stops for breath. The bench is in sight now, probably. She digs around in her pocket for something before continuing.

“I’m gonna give you this burner. You’re not gonna tell anyone about it, you’re not gonna show anyone, you’re not even gonna open it anywhere near anyone. This is your refill ticket, and lemme tell you, the withdrawal on this stuff is intense. So keep this on you.” She drops me on the bench, and I see stars. They’re really very pretty.

She shoves the burner into my pocket. Or somewhere.

“Check it every day. If Mikey has a job for you, he’ll call. You do it, it’s usually something like two hours tops, you get your fix. Easy, right?” She says, huffing. “Or, I mean, you can get some other sucker to show up in front of him, but I figure you might still be a bit bitter about this. Maybe some other time, yeah? When you get desperate.” Ava lights up another cigarette, takes a drag, and sighs. She doesn’t bother to turn away this time, but that's fine since the smoke twirls into unlikely shapes and shifts to new colors before my eyes.

“Sorry about your folks, kid,” she says. And then she walks away. The sky spins, the buildings crawl towards the setting sun, and I lay on a bench in the middle of an ostensibly crime-ridden plaza alone and high.

—

It takes me some amount of time to come down, and when I do start to it comes with a feeling of overwhelming nausea. I do puke this time, off the side of the bench, and some of the effects linger. It’s dark out now, and for some reason it feels exceedingly quiet.

Pretty quickly, I activate my power and give myself a checkup. Trying to conceptualize all the information flooding my brain is difficult at the best of times, and this is no different. Harder, actually, with the residual fuzziness from… that.

All I can really get is some minor differences in my olfactory receptors and some specific parts of my brain. I don’t really understand it.

I shouldn’t need to totally understand it, though. My power doesn’t help me with new stuff, but it does give me a basic sense of what ‘works,’ I guess. I take a few minutes to nudge things back into place until I’m fairly sure it’s back to standard.

Dropping my power, I think I’m starting to feel a little better. Better enough to revert my disguise and come up with a convincing excuse for my parents, at least. Hopefully.