Strangers among us

  He tapped off the arm and took the phone apart, then ran the pieces uhe tap ahem in the sink. With the bckout curtains opehe house revealed itself in desding memory.

  Two-story te aughts stru. White noise carpet and off grey walls. The upstairs like a single space, with rooms that gave easily to doorways. From the bed, he could see clear across the hall into the office, where window blinds glowed overcast grey. Me sighree years ago. Lately, a steady stream of offers by pickup truvestors with warehouses full of new kit tile and adhesive backspshes, all ignored hed at or cussed out. Home. A piece of a distant, fragmented childhood recycled into the afterlife. That he loved it made the abandoning of it more powerful, a more fitting sacrifice towards the birth of a Spirit.

  He got dressed in dark clothes with lots of pockets, very uhe suits and athletic wear and Dals nightclub douche attire that made up the rest of the wardrobe. They stuck out like something willed into being. He felt electrified putting them on, and leaving the rest behind.

  It had been a rough awakening. Dropping into a specific Hardworld was more plicated than the free-form priming he had done in training, and he found many of his abilities hazy or out of practice. This self owned an assault rifle, a pistol, and a Mossberg pump for home defense, but hadn’t been to the range or done any for for months. The market had just been too crazy.

  This Gradie had made a small forturading cryptocurrencies with ridiculous names, a skill developed during a period hteous solitude, and which had allowed him to live the kind of life Gradie dreamed about in the Real. The memories pulled on him as he walked through the house. The trips, the girls, the messages from high school acquaintances looking for advice or something else. His uping two week Maldives vacation, the pne b in an hour, primed to prevent any tact from his few friends and long ignored family during the job. He stuffed the shredded tickets uhe trash and thought of aqua beaches and how long it had been since he had called his sister.

  The SUV honked outside, and the memories lost their power. His spirit jumped up at the sound, eager to charge out into whatever waited in this new world. Being in a Hardworld on a job was nothing like dropping in for training. It was like the whole world en to him. Like his real life was about to begin. He sped out the door in a way that stirred up hazy memories of flying through an impossible city at impossible speeds.

  Outside, a soft m was breaking on a suburban street that could have been anywhere iate. The sky hummed a weak blue between fragmenting clouds, and a silver-grey brilliance smoldered just over the roofs across the street, either an invading overcast or the st remnants of the retreating storm. Dog barks and kid’s shouts zipped through the cool air like bullets let out blindly. House faces held pieces of st night’s shadows in their grouts and uheir gutters. Hedge bushes and fruitless trees only ten years free of their metal stakes sang in sunlight tones from wet leaves on their heads, while their undersides grumbled in sleepy darkness.

  The horn honked again, and Gradie thought he saw the sun jump two inches up the sky as the sound rattled his joints.

  The SUV was all bck with silver trim, like one of its parents had been a hearse, and parked in the driveway at an angle, uo fit otherwise, with the driver’s window fag him. The window rolled down with a billow of smoke like a magi was going to pop out of it. Sam let her cigarette tipped hand hang down while the st of the smoke slithered out the side of her face.

  “What are you wearing!”

  He was wearing a bck trench coat over bck pants and a dark navy oxford. The twins had told him to dress for rain, because it created a natural liminal moment that made using a fragment easier for some Hardworlders. Now, Gradie thought they might have been fug with him. No one else had ever said anything about Hardworlders being able to affect the weather, though there had been a rainstorm the night before the office—

  “You look like a fsher!” she ughed and shook her head, drawing lines of smoke in front of her face.

  Uo think of a good enough eback about her meic coveralls, he smiled as if she was only mildly annoying and walked around to the passenger door. It didn’t opeood there looking at his refle for a bit before the window rolled down.

  “Why did you wear that? Yonna blow our cover!” She looked up at him with those grey-blue eyes, the same color as the departing storm, and he realized it was too hot for the fug jacket.

  “It’s supposed to rain,” he said.

  “So wear a poncho or something!” She smiled like he was telling a joke just standing there, and he felt his cheeks warm.

  “This is what I’m wearing. You gonna open the door?” He was suddenly terrified his daydreams of trench coat shootouts would spill out of his eyes, so he made them hard. She looked aut out her cigarette.

  “The ter doors unlocked.”

  “All right.” He was fih not sitting near her, if that’s what she wanted.

  He pulled himself in and smmed the door.

  “So what, do you have a chauffeur fetish or something?” he said into the awkward silence.

  “What?”

  Gradie started to repeat himself and she guhe gas. He realized as he was flying into the ter sole that he should have buckled in before trash talking the driver. The SUV smmed into the garage door and Gradie ended up with his fa inch above the cupholder ashtray and Sam’s tte. His knee burned from the impact with the at in the sole.

  “That’s why you wear a seatbelt,” Sam said softly. He heard her throw it in reverse. The garage droaned and the tires yelled as they shot backward. Gradie guessed her move and grabbed onto the passenger seat just before she smmed the brakes again.

  “Oops. There’s some py in the breaks,” she said. Gradie reached forward and pulled the lever to drop the passenger seat bad climbed into the front.

  “Hey! No! Bad!” Sam spped the top of his head as he got into the seat. He reached up and caught her wrist. She made a face like a statue and moved her other hand onto her p, where a pistol waited under her thigh.

  “Let go.”

  She poihe gun at his gut. Gradie winced.

  “Are you fug crazy?! You never point—”

  “I know. Let go.”

  He did but kept his eyes on her. A honk from the street made them both jump. A mom in a coupe was waving out the window behind them.

  “Look, if you don’t like that I’m oeam—”

  “Oh my god, I don’t care.”

  “Then why do you care if I sit—"

  “Because Luke is sitting up front.”

  “I got here first.” It sounded juvehe moment he said it, so he looked off dowreet, hoping the words had broken apart on the way to Sam’s ears. They hadn’t.

  “That’s nice. He’s sitting up front because if someone shoots at us, he drop five of them before they finish aiming. you do that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, maybe babies get in the back.”

  “All right, Chives.” Gradie started to open the door and saeeding away, leaving him on the road. He looked back at her and made a face like his hate was being too much for him. While she was raising her gun and looking him in the eye, he grabbed her tte and got out.

  “What the fuck?!”

  He pulled on the middle door and found it locked. Sam groaned and the lock ked in the door. He got ba and tried to hahe cup.

  “Sorry, needed some colteral in case you—”

  “You keep it.”

  He shrugged and took the stopper out. It smelled like peppermint.

  The SUV lurched fain and stopped suddenly. He smmed into the back of the passenger seat and the lid popped off the tte and spilled it down the front of his shirt.

  “Shit!” He puffed his chest out to keep it from getting on his jacket. His hand was burning.

  “Hole in your lip?” Sam asked.

  Rather than say something that would get him shot, he opehe door with his hand and threw the cup on the road. He shook off his other hand and wiped it on his shirt, then carefully took off his jacket and tossed it on the seat. His hand was red and stung like hell. He swore at it.

  “There’s a first aid kit uhe seats.” Sam said, sounding just a bit sympathetic. Gradie shut the door and put his seat belt on with his burnt hand. The pain shouted at every movement. He sat there and stared at his hand while Sam sighed and started driving.

  “This isn’t my body. This isn’t my pain,” he thought to himself. When that didn’t work, he thought about how his hand had felt before the burn, and imagined opening doors and reloading without feeling anything. The pain lessened, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the endorphins. He thought about what it would be like to get shot in a Hardworld and swallowed.

  “There’s aloe vera i,” Sam said.

  Gradie got the box out and put some on his hand. He noticed as he moved that his chest stung too, so he took his shirt off.

  “You are a fug mess,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry I ruined your hitmahetic. Should we stop a you some actual clothes?”

  Gradie looked out the window. Wood-paneled apartment buildings and water-stained er stores ringed by the husks of old gas pumps zipped by. He got an idea.

  “Turn right up here.”

  “Why?”

  “I need a shirt.”

  Sam looked at him in the rear-view mirror but didn’t say anything. He reached ba his memory, suppressing the fear it wouldn’t work this time, and pnted a subtle image, a sedan he had seen a million times driving to work, but kept the form vague. That was the paradox of pushing on a Hardworld. Pushing just enough to tell them what you want, but not so much they refuse to give it to you.

  He saw it.

  “Here, that green Geo.”

  She pulled up o it a out. The car had something stacked in the backseat half blog the rear window, and he already k was undry. He felt goosebumps roll over him.

  “I’m actually doing this,” he thought. It had been so long since his win at the office, he had almost fot, even without the sensation that it had happeo someone else.

  He opehe back door and got in the seat with his legs hanging over the street. In one of the stacks, he found a heather grey shirt. Medium, mens. He pulled it on and closed the door.

  Ba the SUV, he put his coat ba. Sam was watg him in the rear view again.

  “What?”

  “So you just knew some dude left his undry there?” She sounded jealous, or maybe just doubtful. He thought about saying something like ‘it’s easy’ but nodded silently instead. He could see in her eyes that she really wished she could do it. Strange. She could make herself an expert driver, or a master meic, but couldn’t make a t-shirt appear in an old car. The self he had dropped into would probably have trouble ging a tire.

  As he watched the apartment plex slide away, he took o look at the sedan, and a stream of memories poured out at him.

  He really had seen it a thousand times. He had evehe owner open the doors without a fob. As far as his memory was ed, nothing unusual had happened. Something about it made him uneasy, and he reached out for something beyond the Self. It was like resisting the urge to touch a wound for so long that you eventually do it with gusto.

  His new memories fred up at him wheried to remember the Real, and it seemed at the other end of a long hallway, dim and faint. The hallway was made of the Otherworld, a just as much like dream as the real did, so that he had to put effort into categorizing his memories.

  “Oh, here.” Sam threw something back at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled into his p. A small pstic case. He ope up and pressed the earbuds in pe at a time, waiting for the chime that told him the seal was set. Something about the sound afterward was different.

  “I think these are glitg.”

  “Nope. New hardware. Zoey and the boys worked their magid now they amplify natural hearing. And they don’t go all quiet during gunshots.”

  Gradie noticed there wasn’t an echo of Sam’s voice either, anrade sihe st time he had worn them in training, when they had mainly served as a ve way for Philip to berate him.

  Now, driving down the highway on a mission, the earbuds directly eg him with the rest of them, he felt like he art of the team. His heartbeat quied and he smiled out the window.

  They exited suddenly and pulled off the access road into the drive-through li Starbucks. It acked.

  “Johnny! I’m making a stop! Are you up yet?” Sam whispered a melody and her voice was in stereo around Gradie’s head. He looked at his knees and focused on not getting red in the face. There was no answer in the earbuds.

  “You owe me a coffee.” Sam motioned with her hand, aook his card out, then thought about it.

  “Don’t you guys have millions in your at?”

  “Them’s my millions.”

  He ha to her and leaned ba the seat, trying to recim that feeling of rushiement and being a part of something strange and mysterious, but all he could think about was the sound of her voi his ears.

  Gradie's self would tell you he'd passed that car a thousand times, and there was absolutely nothing magical about finding a shirt that fit him inside. ime, Luke has a rough m. episode, Soldier.