The Loop

August 2nd

I’m just a New York City detective, Ricky thought. And impressive as that might once have been—to some people, at least—Ricky now found himself in a world filling up with people who could turn a brick wall into a pile of bricks with their fists, or who could turn a human body into a raging inferno with a mean look. If he had been ten, fifteen years older, he might have hung up his hat, handed in his badge and gun, and settled in to watch the world eat itself alive from the sidelines.

But who was he kidding? He couldn’t have done that, no matter how old he was.

But still he wondered, how could he compete? How could he keep up?

“Hey, Ricky, you seen this shit?”

His partner, Camilla. Her voice grated. Her attitude grated. He looked over at her and all was forgiven. She was, after all, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Skin the color of autumn, hair as fine as corn silk, as black as coal. A body that was … He snapped out of the trance.

Still, He had to stand his ground a little. He had seniority.

“Have I seen what, Pérez? And while we’re on the clock, you can call me Detective Gonzalez.”

“You shittin’ me, Ricky?”

It wasn’t worth the effort.

“Never mind that,” he said with a sigh. “What were you going to ask me?”

“Have you seen this clip?” She turned her monitor around as far as it would go without the power cable pulling out at the back, but he still had to get up from his desk and come around the front of hers to get a good look at the screen.

“What am I looking at here?” he asked, but of course he could tell already. It was all Camilla had wanted to talk about for the past weeks. She’d been one of the ones dismissing all of it as make-believe bullshit right up until the president’s notorious address, and had done a complete one-eighty afterwards. He’d kept an open mind all along. The only thing that had changed for him was that his initial anxiety about the direction things were going had turned into abject horror.

“Okay, so this guy,” she said, pointing at the screen, “he’s made a few videos already. He can fly, but that’s nothing special; lots of them can fly.”

He wanted to point out to her that a man being able to fly was, in fact, pretty special, but he also wanted her to get on with it.

“Well, anyway, you probably recognize the skyline.”

He did, it was Manhattan. The guy in the video was floating out over New York Harbor, and he had the impression that the video was probably taken by an unmanned camera set up on Ellis Island, based on the angles.

It was strange for him to admit that Camilla had a point about this not being very special. After you’ve seen two dozen videos of people flying, they kind of lose their impact.

Suddenly the camera swung down—not unmanned, then, he thought—and focused on a person standing at the water’s edge. It was a man who was wearing what looked like a black jacket with—and the distance and resolution made it hard to be certain of this—a clerical collar.

“Hello, my son!” the man on the shore said, waving genially at the person holding the camera.

Definitely a priest, Ricky thought. Or at least pretending to be one. Is this our guy?

As if to confirm his suspicions, the man who was flying over the harbor started turning and twisting in the air, as if avoiding things that only he could see.

“Holy shit,” Ricky said.

“Shhhh, Ricky. Just keep watching,” said Camilla.

On the screen, the priest started walking toward the cameraman and the two detectives watching heard his cry of fear. The camera fell to the ground and landed sideways, still filming the priest in the foreground and the flying man, who was now moving in an increasingly erratic pattern in the background.

“‘I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought’,” the priest said, looking directly into the camera. “The bible is God’s word, and I am his messenger. Let them come to me that they shall come to him.”

The flying man finally appeared to settle down and he flew toward the camera, landing at the priest’s side and kneeling down.

“Forgive me, Father,” he intoned.

“You are forgiven, my child. And now you’ve been called to a greater purpose. God has called you to help me cleanse the world. Will you accept this mission?”

“I will. Of course I will, Father.”

The man kissed the hand that was held out to him, and the priest helped him to his feet.

The video ended abruptly.

“What I tell you?” asked Camilla. “What I fuckin’ tell you?”

She’d been right. The rumors about the vigilante priest had been true. Ricky hadn’t believed it—hadn’t wanted to believe it; the stories were terrifying. A man—apparently a man of God—was allegedly showing up at people’s houses in the middle of the night and asking them to renounce their sinful lives and join him. That alone was strange behavior, but not the craziest thing happening in New York by a longshot, not even before people started getting powers.

No, the scary part was what people said they saw when he showed up: visions of hellfire and demons, realistic sensory illusions of burning alive, of being flayed by horned monsters with whips, of their loved ones floating by them in a river of blood.

And now, it seemed, he was moving past picking up stray civilians. He was recruiting other Hypes.

“This is a fucking nightmare,” Ricky said.

They weren’t on the case. Officially, there wasn’t even a case yet. Police reports, complaints, sure, but the world was only just starting to get used to powers. The department wasn’t moving that quick. Like most big institutions, they were slow to adapt. Maybe too slow. When people called in complaining about the bogeyman haunting them at night, the people answering the phones did what they’d always done: assumed the caller was on drugs and dispatched EMTs to their location. That they also dispatched a squad car was an afterthought, something they did only so that they could say they had.

The alternative to these calls just coming from a bunch of crazies and drug addicts—that their complaints might be based in reality—was more than anyone wanted to accept.

Camilla had believed in the priest all along, though—as if she hadn't been skeptical about even the existence of Hypes mere weeks before he turned up—and now, if Ricky knew anything about her at all, she’d gloat.

“Ricky … Detective Gonzalez, we have to catch this guy.”

So maybe he didn’t know anything about her after all.

“How do you propose we do that, Pérez? The NYPD isn’t even officially investigating this.”

“But they should be. You know that. And they will be soon enough. Or the FBI will be. It’s all a mess right now because no one knows how to handle superpowered people committing crimes. You’ve heard the same exact rumors I have … Uncle Sam is setting up a federal agency to deal with this shit. But by the time all the various alphabet agencies and police forces work out procedures and jurisdiction, who knows how much damage people like this Gethsemane will have done?”

“Gethsemane?”

“The priest. It’s what a bunch of the people phoning in have said he calls himself. Some biblical thing.”

“No, I know what Gethsemane is. It’s the name of the garden where Jesus prayed before his crucifixion. It’s just a strange name to pick …”

She just shrugged.

Of course Ricky knew what Gethsemane was. He’d been raised in a devout Catholic household in Puebla. He’d remained a devout Catholic even after his big brother, Manuel, was dragged out into the street and shot in the back of the head by narcos from a rival gang. He’d been drawn into the cartel not because that life appealed to him, but because in their small village, there was no other choice for young men. When the recruiters—boys barely older than Manuel, ones they’d known their whole lives, who they’d sat next to during Sunday mass every week—showed up at their door and told Manuel he was one of them now, they hadn’t left any room for discussion.

But they’d left Ricky alone. Why? Ricky asked himself. Because I’m small, weak, came the answer. But he knew it was more than that. The truth was, he was like the kid brother to everyone in town. Everyone called him Ricky ‘El Cerebro’—‘The Brain’. In truth, by the time the recruiters had come along to drag Manuel away from his parents, his brother, his sisters, Ricky was no longer the small, weak child he’d been. But their perception of him was set in stone.

That perception was the only thing that had saved his life.

It had taken until a few years later, when one of his sisters, Valeria, had overdosed on heroin—sold to her by the very narcos who had killed Manuel—and the other, little Xeminita, had gotten caught in the crossfire between two rival cartels and ended up paralyzed from the waist down, before Ricky’s faith finally abandoned him.

He was, by then, studying Political Science at UNAM in Mexico City, far from home, far from the chaos. He had been insulated from it, which only made it harder to accept, and when those final tragedies had befallen his family, he’d resolved to find a way to get them out of Mexico for good. Xemina had agreed to come with him, but his parents wouldn’t leave the village where one son and one daughter were buried.

He’d made an acquaintance—a professor—at Columbia University, and had fought tooth and nail to get himself and Ximena accepted there. They had an uncle living in the States, and that had made it easier to get in, especially with Ximena’s disability and her being under eighteen.

Despite his nickname and reputation, his little sister was the really smart one, and she got into Columbia on a scholarship. Ricky wasn't as lucky. He never worried about tuition though; he’d long since found the cash that Manuel had stashed away during his narco days, a sum amounting to $120,000 in American money.

Ricky had thought then that it was more money than any junior-level narco could possibly have earned in a couple of years, but he didn’t want to consider the realistic possibilities that might have led to it, or face the possibility that maybe he hadn't known his brother as well as he'd thought.

At any rate, it had been enough to get him through his first two years, and after that he’d scrounged and saved, working two jobs and overtime to be able to keep studying in America. He’d finished his degree and been inexplicably drawn to the NYPD, a group he saw as better than the narcos, but not by as much as they should have been.

Change from within, he’d thought. And he’d resolved to be that change.

Ximena had married an American woman, a law professor, and moved with her to Seattle. Back in Puebla, their parents had died of cancer, one after the other. And now Ricky was stranded and alone, once more cut off from his family, isolated. There was nothing for him back in Mexico.

He’d focused all his frustrations with the world and its injustices into his work, and after five years, at the age of thirty, he was a Detective First Grade in the NYPD, and he planned to stay there. He was good at the work, no doubt owing to his trademark brain, which was particularly attuned to analysis and problem solving. And more than that, he liked the work. He felt like he was helping people.

“Ricky … Ricardo,” Camilla said. “Are you still with me?”

“I’m … Yeah. What? What was the question?”

“I asked if you could check out this lead.”

“Lead for what? That dead homeless girl thing?”

“No, not that. I’m getting close on that. Someone spotted that priest in Hell’s Kitchen four days ago. Last night I got a tip that there was a loud bang and a flash of light in the middle of the night inside an abandoned warehouse on 12th Ave. near the cruise terminal on the same day the priest was spotted near there.”

“And you want me to check out that warehouse? Even though the NYPD isn’t investigating this priest? Even though even if it were investigating him, you wouldn’t be on that case? Even though you’re the one interested in all this shit and I really couldn’t care less?”

“Please, Ricky. I’m going to be here all night doing paperwork. You’re going to be done in like forty minutes. Just check out the warehouse. Do a quick walkthrough, take some pictures. See if there’s anything suspicious. That’s all I’m asking.”

Ricky considered it for a long while. He considered the curve of Camilla’s neck where it met her shoulder, considered her long black hair, her perfect brown skin. He disregarded all of those considerations; he was a professional.

He considered her work ethic, her desire to see the city improved, to prevent innocent people from getting hurt, and to catch those responsible when they did. She was rough around the edges, a little ambitious, a little hotheaded—what rookie detective wasn’t? Despite that, she was one of the good ones. Maybe one of the best.

“Fine,” he said. “I have to drop by the shelter and make sure everything’s good there. But if I have time after, I’ll go by.”

He didn’t mention how far out of his way it was; that would only make Camilla try harder to persuade him, and she already had.

——————

He wasn’t just a New York City detective. He was also a volunteer at a homeless shelter—St. James’s—down the street from the precinct. Between his job and this second, unpaid job, he didn’t have a whole lot else going on—didn’t have time. But this was just as important to him. Maybe moreso.

If he were asked to give up one or the other, he’d have a hell of a time choosing.

“Hey, Ricky, have you seen this?”

Kayla, another volunteer. Probably the person he was closest with in the city—definitely outside of work—but, like his partner, Kayla had a way of getting on his nerves.

“What is it this time, Kayla?”

“Come here and tell me this isn’t a joint, or at least, the remains of one.”

She’d obviously already decided it was. But, to humor her, Ricky walked over to where she was standing in a corner of one of the bunk rooms. She was next to a bed that would, if past experience was any indicator of the future, be occupied by a homeless teenager named Felipe that night. It certainly had been the night before, and every other night for the past month.

The other guests—Ricky insisted on calling them ‘guests’ because it felt more humanizing to him—liked Felipe. They liked his wisecracking attitude, his calm nature, his genuine desire to help people out. And because of that, even though it was pretty much unheard of for one person to get the same bunk every day, no matter what time they showed up, for Felipe they made an exception.

Ricky respected all the things about Felipe that everyone else did, of course, but the thing he really liked about Felipe was harder to define.

He reminds me of Manuel, was what he always came back to, but it wasn’t really that, either.

He reminds me of myself.

That was closer to the truth.

Not everyone liked Felipe, though.

“I’m telling you, Ricky: that kid is no good. He’s bringing drugs—drugs—into the shelter. How many of these people are recovering addicts? Hell, current addicts? And he brings this shit in here?”

Ricky examined the object she was holding out to him. It was a rolled up piece of paper, about the size and shape of a cigarette butt. It was free of scorch marks, free of plant matter. He took it from her and unrolled it.

“Shopping list,” he said.

“What? Give me that.”

He handed it back. It was a list of items written on a piece of paper that had been torn in half and then rolled up.

“See,” he said, pointing over her shoulder. “Milk, eggs, soda, paper towel. I can’t quite make out the last bit though, mandarins, maybe? That’s where the page is ripped.”

“Mushrooms,” she said quietly.

“What’s that?”

“Mushrooms … This is my grocery list. It must have fallen out of my pocket.” Her face reddened slightly and she turned away from him to hide the fact.

At least she had the decency to admit it. She could have acted more contrite, Ricky thought, but it was a start.

“Still …” she started.

“Listen, Kayla,” he said, cutting her off before she could launch into some flimsy justification for why Felipe really was no good. “You’re a good person and you do a lot for the people here, but you have to let this go.”

Ricky wasn’t entirely sure what it was about Felipe that made Kayla inherently distrustful of him, but he knew it wasn’t anything as simple as racism. A little over half of the regular guests were people of color, and many of those were of Hispanic or South American descent. Kayla treated all of them equitably and charitably.

Maybe Felipe reminds her of someone, too.

They finished cleaning and sweeping the bunk room, got the beds made with fresh linens. Ricky changed a burnt out lightbulb and Kayla snooped some more around the bunk that was Felipe’s. She muttered to herself as she did. The spoken monologue was a habit of hers that he’d observed plenty, not just when she was agitated, but all the time. He’d never commented on it.

“I’m sorry about the way I’m acting, you know,” she said after they had been working in silence for several minutes. “It’s just … The whole city is on edge right now. It’s like, first these things showed up, and even though rationally I know I should have been freaking out, there was something inside of me telling me to stay calm, telling me that everything would be fine.”

Ricky nodded. “I know what you mean. I think it’s a natural response for a lot of people to look at a drastic and possibly dangerous change in the world and convince themselves that everything is okay, or that it has to work out.”

“Like a defense mechanism?”

“Exactly.” Ricky was thinking about when Manuel had been recruited by the narcos, how he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t really that dangerous, that it would be good to have some extra money coming into the house, that they were essentially just like any other sort of business people.

“Right, I get that. But as time has gone on, and more people are showing up with powers, it’s like …”

“Like that voice of calm is giving way to anxiety?”

“Exactly. Day by day. Like it’s taken weeks for it to dawn on me what’s really happening out there, and how truly crazy it is. This city has its share of very bad, very dangerous people, even before you account for powers.”

“Trust me; I know it.”

“You know a shopkeeper at a bodega was held up today by a guy whose skin was turned to crystal, who could shoot crystal blades out of his hands?”

“I heard about that. Cops arrested the guy.”

“Okay, but like … What if he hadn’t gone quietly? Could bullets even have stopped him?”

“I don’t know. I’m just glad he didn’t resist … Listen, Kayla, I’m freaked out by all this, too. But this is New York. We pull together and we pull through.”

The words sounded good to him, but he wasn’t sure how much truth there was in them.

“So you think we will be okay?”

“Sure. After a bit of an adjustment period, I think we’ll all be fine and the world will keep spinning. And, hey, not everyone who gets powers is going to use them to rob bodegas.”

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

With that, she unlocked the kitchen and Ricky went the other way, taking his two full trash bags out the back door. Ricky understood that when he talked to people like Kayla, he had to measure his words, because no matter what clothes he was wearing, some people saw him as an authority, expected him to know things they didn’t, expected his words to have some weight. They saw the badge whether it was on his belt or not.

Of course, they were balanced out by those who would hate, fear, and mistrust him and every word he spoke for the same reason.

He didn’t blame either group. Not the ones who would cling to perceived authority as much as possible because they couldn’t face a world where everyone was as powerless and clueless as they were, and not the ones who had seen that authority abused one too many times to trust it ever again.

As he came back in through the back door, he looked around appreciatively. The shelter was nothing special—really, it was the definition of barebones; whitewashed brick walls, scuffed-up wood floors, shitty fluorescent light fixtures—but through the hard work and dedication of people like Kayla, and himself, it remained clean, tidy, comfortable. It was a warm, safe place; a refuge. He didn’t spend nights here, of course, but even he felt safer here than almost anywhere else in the city.

The first of the guests were arriving to get a hot meal and to reserve a spot for themselves for the night. The shelter could hold eighty people a night in six bunkrooms—three for women, three for men. The guests weren’t allowed to stay during the day, and they weren’t allowed to leave personal possessions. Most of the earliest arrivals were women with children; the group who felt most motivated to arrive early and ensure that they’d have a place to sleep. Single men and women would trickle in as the night wore on, and Felipe would be along at some indeterminate hour. He didn’t have to worry as much about getting a spot. He knew that the other guests would keep his bunk open for as long as they could.

Ricky spotted one man, a guy named Gary, shuffling along next to a woman and a child he didn’t recognize. Gary had caused problems in the past, had been barred from the shelter for a while, but had cleaned up and gotten off of whatever it was he’d been using and been given another chance. Right now, though, Ricky could tell that something was off. He kept a close eye on Gary and decided to stick around a few minutes longer to make sure everything was okay.

“Hey, sheriff, how are ya?” said Gary, in his characteristic mocking tone. Why he’d started calling Ricky ‘sheriff’, Ricky couldn’t have guessed. He supposed Gary probably thought it would annoy him. It kind of did.

“I’m alright, Gary. How have you been keeping?”

“I’m all right. Right as rain. I’m all right as rain. You feel me?”

“Sure, sure, Gary.” Ricky wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh. “Are these friends of yours?” he asked, indicating the woman and her child?

“Friends? I ain’t got no friends, sheriff. Excepting you, of course.”

“Ma’am, I don’t believe we’ve met,” Ricky said to the woman. “And how are you, kiddo?” he asked the child.

Neither of them turned to face him or acknowledged him at all. They stared dead ahead, as if utterly transfixed by something in front of them. No, thought Ricky. That’s not right. It’s more like they’re not focused on anything at all. Like there’s nothing behind their eyes.

He noticed, too—now that he was paying attention to them—that they looked surprisingly clean and well-dressed for homeless people. He tried to be objective and non-judgemental, and he found that most unhomed people weren’t nearly as filthy as society made them out to be, but still, there was only so much grooming you could do without regular access to sinks, showers, and soap.

“Ma’am,” he said, “are you okay?”

Finally, the woman and the child turned to him in sync, turned their faces toward his, and he saw that their eyes were pure black. They opened their mouths as one and started screaming. Gary started cackling maniacally.

“Kill him,” he said between bouts of laughter. “Kill the sheriff.”

Ricky didn’t have his sidearm on him, and despite how suddenly unnerving the situation was, he probably wouldn’t have drawn it on an unarmed woman and her child, even if their eyes were pure black from lid to lid and they were screaming bloody murder in tandem.

The two of them rushed at him, swinging their arms wildly.

Powers, he thought, as he retreated, vaulting over the counter where Kayla had just started setting out the dishes for supper.

“Hey, watch it!” she shouted. Then, seeing what was chasing him: “Holy shit! What the hell is wrong with those people?”

“Powers,” Ricky said. But theirs, or Gary’s? he wondered.

Gary continued to laugh like a madman as the woman and child smashed into the counter which separated the kitchen from the dining area. The kitchen was otherwise walled off, and the only door would be locked right now; Kayla didn’t like working in the kitchen without having a locked door between her and the outside world. The woman and child kept bumping into the counter, seemingly unable to work out how to get over it.

The other guests had backed up against the walls of the dining hall, women sheltering their children, children cowering in fear.

Ricky grabbed a pan from a rack above the stove as the black-eyed child finally figured out how to climb over the counter. Gary cackled louder than ever and clapped his hands together.

“Kid,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt you. Just stop for a second and we’ll talk.”

The child lunged toward him, his mouth open but no longer screaming. His teeth were filed to sharp points. He reached for Ricky with fingers that came to points, too.

Now that the pair were moving, Ricky noticed other oddities. Their skin was too white, too tight. They looked wholly skeletal. Their hair was wispy, and their clothing was ragged.

How did I ever think they looked clean and well-groomed? he wondered. The only explanation was that their appearance was changing subtly before his eyes.

And … yes, it was, he noted. The child-thing’s limbs were elongating, its teeth growing sharper, its forehead protruding, its hands and claws growing larger and sharper.

Ricky was moving around the island in the center of the kitchen, keeping the thing at arm’s length. It swiped at him with one long-clawed hand, and he swung at that hand with the pan he held. Kayla had moved to the corner by the locked door and was crouching down and cowering there, uttering a string of curses and prayers.

His pan made contact with the thing’s hand—a solid hit—and it reared back, not screaming now, but howling in pain, surprise, rage.

He kept glancing back at the woman, who somehow still hadn’t figured out how to get over the three foot high counter. Like her ‘son’, she had grown considerably, and was howling in frustration.

Ricky discarded the pan and picked up a long knife instead.

“Call the cops, Kayla,” he said, calmly. He went on the offensive while the thing was still shaking its clawed hand and howling in pain. A jab towards its other hand, with the aim of disabling its ability to cause harm. The knife made contact easily—the thing didn’t seem to have enough intelligence to even try to evade an obvious attack—but it proved pointless, as the blade cracked and broke without breaking skin. No, he thought. Not skin. Scales. And it was true, at some point the thing’s skin had transitioned into a sort of scaly armor.

“¿Qué chingados?” he muttered.

Finally, and with what seemed like a monumental mental effort, the larger thing—for Ricky no longer thought of them as a woman or a child—threw itself violently over the counter and entered the fray. It rushed at Ricky and bowled him over, but didn’t stop itself before it ran head first into the wall behind him.

The smaller one was finally recovering from its momentary pain as Ricky gained his feet and picked up another, heavier pan. Their skin might be impenetrable, he thought, but blunt force seemed to work.

He approached the larger one cautiously—keeping the small one in sight—as she shook her head wildly back and forth, as if upon running past him and hitting the wall, she’d completely lost track of him.

He swung as hard as he could and hit her in the back of the head. She fell forward, twitching.

The other one slowed down, then stopped altogether, staring forward in that creepy, focused-on-nothing way again.

“Not bad,” said Gary, climbing over the counter himself now. “They’re not as smart as I’d hoped, but I’ll have time to work on that. No point helping people reach their potential if they just turn into mindless monsters, you feel me, sheriff?”

Ricky could hear sirens outside.

“Gary, what the hell is this?”

Gary touched the shoulder of the smaller monster and it crumbled into ash. The ash floated in the air as if suspended by an invisible current, then made its way into Gary’s open mouth.

“The boy did alright, might have some potential,” he said. “But she’s useless; obviously something went wrong with her.” He stated these things in such a matter-of-fact tone that Ricky almost missed the fact that they were completely unhinged.

Gary touched the shoulder of the other one, and it too turned to ash. But instead of collecting it into his mouth, Gary let it fall to a pile on the floor. The pile slowly reformed itself into the shape of a human woman, slumped over unconscious but still breathing.

Cops were rushing in the front door now, and Kayla was shouting for them to come quick. Ricky himself was frozen to the spot. He’d been in tense situations with criminals before, and he’d been in his fair share of fights, but nothing had ever prepared him for something like this. Could anything?

“We’re in here!” he shouted, finally figuring out how to make his mouth work again.

“Oh, don’t bother, sheriff. They ain’t gonna catch me. No, no. Old Gary’s better now. Off the drugs and off the sauce. But old Gary remembers who done him wrong, yes he do. And old Gary don’t forgive too easy.”

As the officers came around through the kitchen door, guns drawn and pointed at the ceiling, Gary’s body turned to dust and floated away, up through the vent above the stove and from there, Ricky had no idea. He didn’t have it in him to do anything but stand and watch.

“Ricky,” said Kayla, out of breath from her near-constant stream of quiet, panicked dialogue. “You’re still telling me things will be okay?”

“I said after an adjustment period,” he replied.

——————

By the time interviews with the police had concluded—with Ricky simultaneously playing the roles of interviewee, ranking officer, and liaison-slash-advocate for the homeless—it was almost midnight. He was exhausted, both in body and mind, and he wanted nothing more than to go to bed.

Well, actually, there was exactly one thing he wanted more.

He made his way South down 12th Avenue, having had the cab drop him off six blocks from his destination. It would be reasonable to assume after the day he’d had that he wouldn’t want to walk at all, but the truth was that nothing worked better to clear his head than walking at night, and there was, in his mind, no better place to do it than Manhattan.

Even at this late hour, the air was warm; it had been a summer for the record books. But it was more than the pleasantly warm, fresh air with the slightest refreshing breeze that revitalized him. The air, and the city that breathed it, were alive. Even now, well past midnight, there were more interesting and varied people out on the streets than you’d find anywhere else.

As he strolled at a leisurely pace, not putting his brain into looking-for-clues mode—not yet—he heard snippets of conversations and jovial shouting matches in five different languages. He caught words in Spanish, which made him think of home, but it wasn’t his Spanish. The accents were Peruvian and Cuban. He understood them, but they weren’t his people. Or rather, they didn’t used to be his people. But they were New Yorkers, so that made them his people in the here and now.

The intense heat of the day had broken slightly and led into a brief but violent storm while he was still at the shelter, and now the world was coated in an almost imperceptibly thin layer of cool water, evaporating quickly back into the air, making the light from street lamps hazy and diffuse, creating halos around everything.

There was a smell. Garbage was a big part of it, of course, but it was also the fresh smell of green things growing in Central Park and in the cracks in the pavement, and the smell of day-old donuts—‘Best in the City’—that wafted toward him from a bodega on the corner, and the ever-present aromas of saltwater and sewage and perfume and car exhaust. Nowhere else in the world smelled like this section of 12th Avenue, and 12th Avenue didn’t smell like this at any other time of day.

He hadn’t been committed to coming here before what had gone down at the shelter, not fully, anyway. And if he had come, it would have just been as a favor to his partner. The powers stuff, the obsession, that was all her. But now … now he wanted answers, and this was the closest thing to a lead that he had.

It occurred to him, of course, how flimsy it was, as leads went. It wasn’t even that the priest himself had been seen coming or going from this warehouse, only that the priest had been spotted ‘near’ here on the same day that someone had heard a loud noise and seen a bright light in here.

Even if the priest had been here, he was obviously long gone.

Still, he had to look. The priest wasn’t Gary, and Gary wasn’t the priest. But if Ricky could learn anything at all about powers, maybe he could bring one or both of them to justice. Maybe he could help stop things like the incident at the shelter or the one at Ellis Island from happening again.

He walked up to the front door of the warehouse and breathed out a long sigh, and with it went all his casual, touristy musings about the city. Now he was a detective, now he was on the case, even if there wasn’t really a case.

He twisted the knob, certain that it would be locked and he’d have to find another way in, very aware that what he was doing constituted breaking and entering. Instead, he found that the knob wasn’t even connected, and the door opened inward at the slightest nudge.

¡Dios mío! He heard his mother’s voice in his head. ¿Qué estás haciendo, mi hijo? Something his brother and him had both heard a lot growing up. He thought she’d loved the sing-songy rhyming of ‘mío’ and ‘mi hijo’, or else had just loved to get on their cases. It was rarely undeserved.

“What the hell am I doing?” he muttered to no one.

He stepped into the room and pulled his flashlight from his pocket. He illuminated the space around him.

It was a large, empty space, unbroken by walls until about fifty feet in. There was almost nothing in the empty area he’d walked into, and it didn’t take more than a cursory sweep of the flashlight to dismiss the possibility of it having been recently used for any nefarious criminal activities. Even the best criminals left behind something; a candy bar wrapper, a shell casing, tracks in the dust.

But wait, he thought. There are tracks in the dust.

Right beneath his feet he saw them, and they led straight from the front door to the door next to the stairs that led up to a catwalk on the second level.

He assumed that door must have led into some sort of administrative office, and though the warehouse was clearly abandoned, the farther in he went, the more aware he became of the laws he was breaking by being here. Someone still held the lease for this place, and he certainly didn’t have a warrant.

Nonetheless, he made his way back, constantly checking the prints beneath him, the door ahead of him, and, with some degree of trepidation, the empty space to his left, right, and back.

He arrived at the door feeling like not only was he breaking the law, but someone—or something—could see him doing it. He raised a steady hand up to the handle. Always steady, even when his insides were in turmoil. He couldn’t have done his job if he weren’t that way.

He pushed the door open before any more reservations could come to the forefront of his mind, and he saw it.

Orb. It wasn’t a word he used in everyday conversation. Wasn’t a word he could have pictured himself ever having a reason to use. But it was the word that came to mind.

It was—or appeared to be—stainless steel, perfectly smooth, perfectly round. It was polished to such extreme precision that looking into it didn’t even feel like looking into a mirror, it felt like looking into a more real version of reality, like the world around him was the reflection.

He noted that he no longer needed the flashlight. This room was brighter than the big, empty room he’d just passed through, even though it had windows and this room did not. There were no lights on. It was the orb itself; it emitted a low blue glow.

Hello, Detective Gonzalez, he heard a voice—its voice—in his head. You’ve come hoping to learn more about powers, haven’t you?

He didn’t reply—not out loud, and not in his mind.

Well, what better way than to get yourself some? And, of course, you can choose some others—some friends—to receive my powers, too.

There was something almost ironic in its tone, he thought. If the voice of an inanimate object speaking directly into his mind could be said to have a tone at all.

It was hard then not to see the hand of fate in this; to come looking for information about powers and to find power itself.

He was drawn to power. He craved it. Who doesn’t, to some degree or other?

He thought of the good he could do.

But no, that was a lie. He thought about that afterward, an ex post facto justification. At the time, he didn’t think clearly of anything at all.

Before he realized he had stepped into the room, he had his hand on the orb. And before he could appreciate what that meant, he was slumping forward and bouncing his skull off the floor.