other things. Other... but there’s a chance that I could, I mean, it’s not definitive...”
“A chance.”
“A chance that I could prevent the door from opening. In those few minutes. Slam it shut, lock it, and maybe keep it locked for a long, long time. I could beat Them there if They don’t know I’m coming. If they think I won’t go on the offensive.”
“That sounds pretty good,” I said. My voice felt as if it were coming from a long way away. I wondered if the attack, or her experimental weapon, had damaged my eardrums. “For the planet, I mean. That’s cool.”
“Nick.”
“Did you see where my shoe went? I’m not really... like, swimming in shoes. I have three pairs of shoes. So that’s like a... seventeen percent reduction right there.”
“Nick, you’re in shock. Sit down.”
“Is my math right? Did one of the things eat my shoe? Where did Rutger go? Where are the kids?”
“Sit. Down.”
I sat, heavily, on the lone unbroken kitchen chair. Those sonsabitches destroyed one room in her house. Unfair. What the hell kind of weapon had she used? I searched my memory and found a hole in it, a missing minute or two, funnily angled at the sides. I stuck a finger in my ear and twirled, looked down at my socked foot. A sparkling shard of glass had lodged in the dingy fabric, but I didn’t see any blood. Lucky. I carefully pulled it out, half-listening to Johnny.
“You said you wanted to help,” she said. “Come with me to the gate. I can’t do this alone.”
I laughed. “You do everything alone. What do you need me for? Or what do I need you for? To protect me?” Something popped in my ear, and everything sounded much clearer on that side.
She watched me for a moment, her face calculating, serious. Waiting for me to figure it out.
Leverage, I thought. Me as leverage against her, my family as leverage against me. And if They couldn’t get ahold of Mom and the kids to use, then they were safer away from us. But not me. I was still fair game no matter where I went. “Shit.”
Softly, she said, “I need your help. Isn’t that what friends do?”
“Of course it is,” I said automatically. But even as I said it I wasn’t sure if I was lying. We were friends because we had always been friends, but... why? What did she ever see in me, and what did she see now? We had fought about it, as kids; I had accused her of being a grownup in a child’s body, humouring me out of pity and habit, secretly preferring time with her grownup friends. And she had raged at me, cried. I had been shocked at my ability to hurt her, taking that—rightly or wrongly—as proof of her love. After all, I thought, no stranger had ever brought her to tears. But now I wondered if she had cried because she didn’t have any grownup friends. Because she had no one but me. Never had. When we were little she’d confided that she felt she had no one to communicate with, no community. Then, after meeting me, she had a community of two. Always us against the world. The world that demanded different things of us, but which we had always faced together.
I took a deep breath, attempting to pull myself together, and said, “When’s the thing? The alignment? Are those things going to come back? I have to talk to Mom, the kids, call the—”
“I put Rutger in charge of all that.”
“What? In charge of what? All what?”
“Don’t worry about that. Do you trust me?”
“Yes. You know that. But...” I waved a hand helplessly at the house. “What are we going to do about all... this? This isn’t livable. The management company is going to freak out. We—”
“I’ll deal with it,” she said firmly. “Here.” She turned and dug in her bag, coming out with her chequebook and a fountain pen. I watched numbly as she tore off a cheque and put it on the table next to me to scrawl a number—the zeroes tumbling, never seeming to stop—signed it, and handed it to me. It was made out to Mom. “To fix the house, for your rent, and for the work you’ll miss.”
I stared at it. She always got novelty cheques and this one was particularly bad, some old-styley dinosaur painting with a tiny-headed, big-mouthed T-rex attempting to maul a triceratops that looked like a rabid dog. Their