Let us go and make our visit

  Gradie had been watg the powerlines go by for an hour when they pulled off the access road and slowed into a turn.

  “This is it,” Michael said from the driver’s seat.

  They turned down a dusty street, with low brick walls along the sidewalks, into an unfinished subdivision. Off to the side, a portable office trailer sagged in a sand lot and Texas thistle bowed in bright purple bursts all around it. There were half-built houses scattered across the dirt lots and not a car in sight.

  “Whie?” Gradie asked.

  “Whie what?” said EP.

  “Whie is the clubhouse?”

  “All of it is the Clubhouse. It’s our home in the hardworlds.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t you want like a bunker or something?”

  Michael ughed.

  “That wouldn’t really fit with the work we do.”

  They passed ay lot marked off by a rebar and tarp divider, a house with stickers still on the windows and a sold sign on the curb, a golden wooden frame roasting in the sun, houses with faces of brid faux stone and bare drywall and tacky little screwed in shutters, leaning porta potties, pressed wood boxes with numbers spray painted on the sides, fill rock heaps, fruitless saplings with rebar supports, checkerboards of dead drying grass, and ay pool plete with waterslides.

  His warm euphoric weekend feeling dissolved, and something else floated out of the air. It flowed under his skin, rolled out with his breath, slid up his spine and spread behind his throat. A feeliweeement and panic, severing him from himself, like he had popped iehe moment they ehe neighborhood. That feeling, of being stu the edge of something, out of reach of everything else, got stronger as the street rushed beh him.

  Michael, as usual, seemed to have a sixth sense.

  “Feels strange, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He struggled to put the feeling into words.

  “It’s a fragment,” Michael said.

  “Like the hotel room?” It felt wrong to mention out loud what he still partly believed were his dreams, but it was even strao have someone else uand.

  “Yes and no,” Michael said. “A fragment mean just a part of the Otherworld created to look like the Real, but this is more specifi this case, fragments are pces we drop out of the Otherworld and sink into the Hardworlds.

  “What?”

  “The Otherworld is liquid, malleable. When we make something there, a portion of it solidifies. If we make something realistiough, something that s to the rules of the Real, it bees too deo exist iherworld and drops out. Like a stone formed in the ter of a pond.”

  Gradie’s focus drifted away from Michael’s voice. Outside, the horizon hid behind a brick subdivision wall and house faces squared off at odd angles under a bzing blue sky. Bright clouds hovered frozen in pd gave her depth nor motion to the world below. Everything floated alone.

  “Feels…separated,” Gradie said.

  A Fragment. The like a glove. He felt fragmented from the rest of the world. He liked the feeling.

  “We call it floating,” EP said. “You feel it in a fragment because they’re liminal spaces.”

  “A what?”

  “An iween pce, like ay parking lot, a hotel hallway, or a dead mall. Pces that seem cut off from everything else, but also familiar.”

  Gradie’s mouth hung open as he matched the feeling with pces from his memory. His thoughts drifted towards the mall, but Michael interrupted him.

  “It’s easier, psychologically, to drop a liminal spato a Hardworld. The mind ceptualize that there’s a wider world beyond it, without knowily what.”

  Gradie had gotteo only o of any three words Michael said to him making any sense, but somehow, he uood exactly what Michael meant. Portals to other worlds. What else could they be?

  Michael parked in the ter of a T interse fag a massive three-story house. For its size, it wasn’t made of aer materials or style than the rest of them. It looked like four or five of the other houses fused together.

  “They’re pulling in,” EP said.

  Down the sand-blown street, a rge bck SUV barreled over trash and kicked up dust like a Humvee in war footage. Michael opehe door and looked back at Gradie.

  “Time to meet the team.” He got out and the car rocked. EP followed him and Gradie sat there a moment, pio the seat by the thought of meeting new, and in this case probably deadly, people. Reminding himself that this was another universe where his job would be shooting people, he got out and stood o the car in a pose he hoped veyed some kind of fidence.

  The SUV stopped smoothly on the dirt and dried sod front wn, and the driver’s door opened before it stopped rog. The driver got out, and Gradie’s nervousness gave way to curiosity, and something else.

  She shook the st drops out of a paper coffee cup and dropped it to the ground. A sudden wi it skipping across the dirt and pressed her coverall against her body. For a moment, her swelling curves were silhouetted against the bck mirror side of the SUV.

  She locked eyes with Gradie as a gentler breeze threw her short, thick, bright red hair into a dan top of her round head. Her eyes were a blue grey that made him think of bursting rain clouds lit up by the sun. Pale skin, freckles, perfect round face. She was the cutest thing he had seen in a long time.

  She made a face he couldn’t decipher and broke eye tact, saying something muffled by the wind to a man stepping out of the ter seat. Beer bottles tumbled out the door and ked at his feet.

  He was slim built and just over six feet, with a diamond fad aquiliures. His bck eyes sed everything with calm fident indifference. He whatever the girl had said and gave Gradie a quiod before looking around at the half-built neighborhood like there could be snipers anywhere, but he wouldn’t be too ed if he saw any.

  “M,” Michael called to them. “Luke, I’m gonna need your speeslurred today.”

  Luke looked down at the bottles then back up with a smile.

  “Oh, it’s more of a hair of the dog situation, man.” He spoke with a ce halfway between smooth and slurred, and the wlided out so easily you worried about them dropping out of p the way.

  Another man came around the passenger side, shaking his head. He was about average height judging from the SUV, but his squat features made him seem much shorter. Predatory brown eyes looked Gradie over then shot off to find some other prey. Cigar smoke flowed off of him and the cherry made a figure eight as he walked, wrestler like, across the dirt.

  “Where’s our two super models?” he said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the girl ughed. He smiled without looking at her and drew off the cigar.

  “Celeste is en route,” said EP, tapping on her phone.

  “Getting outta bed right… about…” Luke said, looking at his watd holding one finger in the air.

  “—and Lindsey is—” EP was cut short by the demonic roar of a motorcycle flying into the neighborhood, engine roar funneled by the two stone walls at the entrance.

  “She wearing one of those tex biker suits?” Luke asked hopefully. The girl punched him in the kidney, and he buckled and dropped his half lit cigarette.

  “Shit!”

  “We’re gonna put you in one of those, you don’t shut up,” she said. The cigar smoking man ughed.

  “Gradie,” Michael said loudly, pointing. “This is Luke, our lead operator, Philip our ons and supply specialist, and Sam our driver.”

  “Sup.” Luke shook his hand while digging the cigarette out of the dirt. Philip’s handshake felt like an attempt to break knuckles, and his eyes searched Gradie’s for something in the half a sed they were fixed on him.

  Sam shook his hand pinly and froze. A heartbeat of grey blue stare, flickering like a car fire, then fluttering lips and words that nded before their meaning.

  “You smell like burnt gasoline.”

  “Oh yea, I torched my car.” His voice came out just louder than the wind.

  “Oh.” Or it might have been just an exhale. She put her hands in her pockets and gnced out at the houses behind him.

  “Sam was our member until a few ho,” Michael said.

  “So, what do you do?” Her eyes flicked ba, aiced a ring of another color in the ter.

  “Uh,”

  “That remains to be seen,” Michael said. “We’ll have to see what he takes to.”

  Philip made a face like he had something to say about that, but a bck Hayabusa growled into the driveway before he could.

  She was not wearing a tex suit, but a bck leather padded jacket, dark blue jeans, and worn in bck boots. The helmet came off and a bun of sandy blonde hair caught the sun, whisps of gold stretg in the wind. Barely-there eyebrows, freckled heart-shaped face, and green eyes gring like she was already sick of it.

  Hazily, Gradie reized her. She was the woman he had seen walking across the lot in that other dreamlike world, who had shot the cop ihe gas station. The one he had kissed and taken a beating from. The memories were soft while the woman on the bike was solid and real.

  “That’s a sick bike Lindsey,” Sam said. Lindsey smiled, showing a kindness Gradie had trouble matg with the memories of headshots and a warning to Michael; Don’t buy it.

  “I’m gon one of those, and yall are gonna half to squeeze into a sidecar,” Sam said.

  “You’ll be driving the bus you try that shit,” said Philip.

  “Wele to the team.” Lindsey was suddenly in front of Gradie. He shook her hand. If she remembered or cared about their first meeting, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell anything. She had a wall about her as well-built as Lucy’s. She walked to the front of the house and everyone followed.

  “Waiting on princess, yet again,” Philip said.

  “She has a name,” said Lindsey.

  There was a raspy meow from the bushes and a stocky brown tabby nuzzled its head on Sam’s calf.

  “Aw, Bojo!” Sam picked him up like a baby and he purred loudly and rubbed his head on her . Gradie wondered about infinite copies of cats, and whether they would remember the other versions of you, but his head had been spun out so mu the ride over that he tried to focus on hings, like Lindsey’s ass or the soft sound of EPs voice as she spoke to someone on the phone.

  “Celeste is pulling up.”

  “Whatever the fuck that means,” Philip said. Lindsey opehe front door without so much as turning the knob and Gradie followed them inside.

  The entryway, with a four sed camera feed on the wall and an assault rifle slung from a hook in the er, led to a high-ceilinged hallway lined with three closed doors and a stairwell. The gentle cool stillness felt like arriving somewhere long awaited after the dusty windiness outside, and wheepped into the living area at the end of the hall, the strange feeling of being stuck between things fell away like a fever braking.

  “Home sweet home,” Sam sung, dropping Bojo on the middle tier of a massive cat tree that reached from the floor to the sed-story loft railing.

  It was like a house thrown together suddenly at the whims of a stra driven person, withard to cost or taste.

  The walls were covered iVs and shelves, the shelves in books, guns, photos, blueprints or bare carpet coated in cat fur. The furniture was miss-matched and well-worn, topped with bs, cushions, and pillows. There were high-backed office chairs all around the table between the living room and the kit bar. Gradie smelled rich coffee and a distant grill. It was like a home that had been waiting for him all his life.

  Michael moved around in the sunlit kit, full of pastel appliances and hanging stainless steel. The espresso mae started up and Sam watched it ily. The rest of the team fous or poured drinks. Gradie stood around awkwardly for a bit, watg Bojo move from shelf to shelf across the wall, then sat down in one of the chairs at the table.

  “So, what am I going to be doing today?” The chair rolled off towards the coud he had to kick himself bato pce.

  “We’re going to give you an introdu to operating in a Hardworld,” Michael said. “A you familiar with cepts you’ll o uand when you’re on a job.”

  “Oh.”

  “You disappointed?” asked Lindsey, as she sat down at the bar.

  “I thought we were going to do some training or something.” Liook a cappuo from Sam with an opened mouth smile of feigned surprise that Gradie would never have been able to imagine on her. Sam retur with a wink. Michael yelled over the milk frother.

  “Most training happens iherworld where we get you used to not failing. I brought you here because until you get into a Hardworld by yourself, we ’t really teach you anything.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “It’s open!” Sam yelled from the kit. The door smmed shut and someone jingled down the hall.

  “Why is it always like a dust storm out there?” She blinked dust out her eyes, batting her long shes and showing off her nails as she pulled on her lower lids. Her bck eyes flicked across the room and found Gradie. A catlike smile made him stop breathing. She was a knockout. Her hss figure tested the limits of cutoffs and a crop top.

  “Hi, I’m Celeste.” He was still sitting so she had to bend over to shake his hand. He got an eyeful.

  “Gradie,” was all he got out, as a deep growl.

  “Stand up when a dy ehe room,” Philip barked.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Celeste ughed. She set her purse on a stool and bounced into the kit.

  “Samantha! I need your coffee! The shit they serve out there is inhumane.” She hugged Sam from behind, ing her arms around her waist and nuzzling the top of her head.

  “Stop,” said Sam, smiling shyly and turning red.

  “What do you want, Gradie? Cappuo, tte?” Michael said, tamping espresso.

  “Uh, however.” Celeste still hadn’t let go of Sam and was now swaying her in a kind of dance.

  “Sam special then,” she said to the top of her head.

  Gradie forced himself to look away from the girls and saw a shotgun leaned against the wall. A nervous pang twisted his stomach. What if he couldn’t do whatever it was they did? What if he wasn’t cut out for it? He reached for the excitement he had felt watg his car burn, but it was like a mindless mania pared to the calm fidence of the team. He searched through his memories of the Otherworld, but got pinned once again by Lucy’s seeking stare.

  Sam saved him from his refles with a steaming cup of foam. He took a sip and the world dropped away.

  “Holy shit.” It was the best coffee any version of him had ever had.

  “She’s a witch.” Celeste bounced by with a tte cupped in both hands. She took a sip and wi Gradie, but he had no idea why.

  “I thought you would be a ft-white kinda guy,” Sam said bashfully as she sat down on the couch. A puffed lens of mi wobbled over the rim of her cat print mug but never spilled.

  “All right, let’s get started,” said Michael.

  Luke, Celeste, and Lindsey sat on a couch to his left. Michael took a seat between EP and Sam on another cou front of him. Philip stood off in the er near a slightly open window, blowing cigar smoke through the crack.

  “Wele to the team Gradie,” said Michael.

  “The first thing I want you to do, is to tell me who you are.”

  Home is where the Spirit is, and full of guns and ammo. ime, Gradie learns how to disturb the universe, and so will you. Find out what it means to be a Hardworlder. episode: Pushing Memory.