The sun was setting when they returned to the library. Hailey had fallen asleep in one of the reading barrels, a stack of topographical maps next to her and a record of land deeds tipped open on her chest. Shane was on one of the computer stations, his eyes bleary, while Stan and Morris studied more county records seated next to one another. Both young and old man rubbed his temples, unaware of mirroring each other. It made Kenia smile as she came through the French doors from the foyer with Austin and Octavian. Austin, who had maintained his brooding silence during the drive back, went straight to an empty computer station and settled in next to Shane without a word.
“You all find much?” Morris asked.
“Well, it was interesting to see the ruins. The blast radius is impressive,” Octavian said. He looked to Austin, as if waiting for him to provide his own comment, but he was already lost to them as he clicked through websites. “But I don’t think we found much.”
“I learned about explosive agents, but I could have learned that sitting here in the air conditioning, not burning up in that suit,” Kenia said, snapping the front of her shirt for air.
“How about you all?” Octavian asked.
Morris and Stan’s eyes met before Morris answered, “Other than the fact that Harold Bridgewater is astronomically wealthy, nothing new.”
“Heterosexual WASP man owns half the world. Not really breaking news, is it?” Shane said, without looking up from his computer terminal.
“But he’s really rich. He’s got investments in everything from Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and ExxonMobil,” Stan added. “And through his shell corporations, he owns more than half of the wealth in this state.”
“Don’t white men own enough shit?” Kenia asked, settling into a chair.
The twins exchanged a look. Stan shrugged, “Apparently not.”
Octavian said he would order a pizza and start taking requests for toppings. Shane turned from his computer with renewed vigor. “Green peppers and olives.”
“Noted,” Octavian said. “Austin?”
“Whatever, I’ll eat whatever,” Austin said, without turning from the computer screen.
“What’s with him?” Stan asked.
“Don’t know,” Kenia said. “He’s been like that since we visited the blast site.”
They ate on the back porch, the topics of Bridgewater, Selah, even time travel exhausted for the day. Instead, they told stories about their families. The Pennel children laughed as Octavian and Morris fought over whose recollection of the time they had set off a coffee can of black powder in their basement was more accurate. They agreed that they had been using a soldering iron next to the can—which had been left open. But it was what they were soldering that was in dispute. Octavian insisted it had been a shortwave radio, while Morris remembered a pinewood derby car.
“But you didn’t even like the Boy Scouts,” Octavian countered.
“It was your car. You asked me to help!”
“What were you two doing with a can of black powder in the first place?” Stan asked, lifting a slice of pizza from the box while Shane picked up an olive stranded behind in a string of cheese.
“Well, you could order the stuff right out of the back pages of Boy’s Life magazine back in those days,” Octavian said. “Along with sea monkey colonies, X-ray glasses, and solar-powered blimps.”
“Those were less litigious days back then,” Morris added.
“Austin would flip if we had something like that in the house,” Hailey said.
“Well, then the piece of molten sodder popped and landed in the can, and we made for the basement steps. It saved our lives. The explosion was so big, it lifted the house off the foundations,” Morris said, his expression caught between mirth and astonishment.
Hailey was looking through the back window into the reading room where Austin was eating his pizza off a paper plate, still in front of the computer, alone except for whomever he had on speakerphone.
“He all right?” Octavian asked.
“Yeah, he gets fixated like this sometimes. Blocks everything else out.”
“I guess that helped defusing IEDs,” Morris said.
“Probably,” Hailey said with a yawn.
Kenia realized what all the Pennels had been through since she had last jumped, Hailey having awoken and alerted them all when Kenia had disappeared. Now that the pizza was in their bellies and the adrenaline worn off, weariness was descending on them all.
“Guys, I’m beat. I think I need to crash,” Kenia said, sipping the dregs of her lemonade, the ice cubes clinking together in the empty cup.
“Well, Austin seems too preoccupied to drive you home in the Jeep,” Octavian said, dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin. “I’ll give you a ride in the Camry.”
It was dark by the time Octavian dropped Kenia off at the Corrigans’. She stopped outside along her walk up the driveway to chat with Earl and Margaret, who were on the front porch watching Colton catch the fireflies lifting up from the lawn in lazy circles. Sandra was out with some old girlfriends, they said, and so they were babysitting. Colton was consumed with his efforts to capture the fireflies, for which Kenia was secretly grateful, for she did not have the energy to read him a story that night. After a sufficient amount of small talk, she made her way back to the apartment over the garage. Her steps on the stairs were slow and plodding, her head thick with fatigue, even while she tried to untangle all they had learned that day, deciphering facts from speculation.
The door popped open as she unlocked it, almost as if it had not been locked properly in the frame. She thought little of it, except to make a note to give it an extra tug the next time she left the house.
Her keys had just landed on the table next to the door and she was reaching for the light switch when she felt someone wrap her forearm in an inescapable grip and twist it behind her back, tugging it hard into the space between her shoulder blades. She flailed with her free arm and elbow, striking her assailant. He was a large, solid man, from what she could gather from her useless counterattack. He clamped a hand covered in a leather glove over her mouth and pulled her head back. In that moment, a second intruder punched her so hard in the gut that her eyes filled with tears and she struggled to breathe. A second punch followed the first so fast that she was not sure she would even be able to remain conscious.
Her assailants realized this, the one behind her yanking on her braids while the other slapped her face. “Oh no, you are not leaving just yet,” he said in a cloying voice tinged with a backwoods twang.
She could smell the remnants of ham, onion, and mustard on the breath of one of them. She tried to call for help while her mouth was uncovered, but the air was not in her lungs.
“Ah, ah, ah,” the man in front of her said.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that she could see that his face was hidden behind a black ski mask. He was tall, well over six feet, but he was also top-heavy with shoulders as thick and muscular as a bull’s. She heard the unmistakable sound of a strip of duct tape peeling off from its roll. They stretched it across her mouth, allowing the man behind her to restrain her by both arms.
“Now that’s a good girl, a good little nigger bitch. Now you want to have some fun with us?”
Thiscan’tbehappeningthiscan’tbehappeningthiscan’tbehappening . . . .
The one in front grabbed her jawbone, pinching her face in the vice of his hand, and turned her face from side to side then looked at her straight on. His breath was a hot funk in her face, his lips curled around his barred teeth. “How would you like some white in you? Would you like that?”
She tried to resist, but it was utterly useless, her strength insufficient to counter her captors’ force. She dragged her feet and tried to kick, but there was nothing she could do to stop the chain of movements leading them to slam her down, face first, on the kitchen table. She felt one of them put a hand on her hip and squeeze. Dazed, she turned her head, craning her neck, only to see one of the men stepping towards the door to lock it.
That was when the door exploded. The frame splintering, the glass panes shattering, the shards falling in a rain from behind the horizontal blinds, which themselves billowed and waved as the door swung open, struck the man in the face, stunning him, and sent him tumbling backwards.
The figure from the other side burst in with—what appeared to be—a post from the bannister along the stairs outside. The wood of the post gave way with a crack after Austin Pennel slammed it down on the crown of the nearest man’s head. The man fell back, trying to steady himself against the back of the sofa, reaching for what looked like a Taser of some sort on his belt. Austin wasted no time, closing the distance and punching the man, not in the face, but his left collar bone.
They could all hear a muffled crack before the man let out a groan and dropped the Taser. He reached up with his right hand to protect his left shoulder. With a cold methodology, Austin took the man’s right wrist in his hands and folded it back, leveraging the hand down with nothing but the force of his thumbs. When the elbow locked, Austin hammered down on it with a crisp motion, hyperextending it a clean forty-five degrees.
When he let go, the man fell to his knees with a cry. He started to pitch forward, but when he reached out to catch himself, he found both arms immobile and fell flat on his face.
Austin picked up the Taser, cracked open the back and let the battery drop to the floor. The second intruder had let go of Kenia and stepped backwards, his hands raised in supplication, his voice high and tight as fear closed his throat.
“We didn’t mean no harm, just trying to scare her. Send her a message. We were just following orders.”
Austin answered by splaying out his fingers, before curling them back into fists, his knuckles cracking. He shook out a crick in his neck, watching the injured man scramble across the room and disappear out the door, slipping and crashing into the splintered frame of the door as he did so. The apartment shook as he ran down the steps, leaving his partner behind.
“You want to reassess your options?” Austin asked, his voice laced with menace.
The second man did not hesitate to run to the door himself, Austin and Kenia both listening as his footsteps trampled down the stairs, pounded across the driveway, and were gone.