THE LOCATION EDILIO obtained from the mayor was the Park Avenue Armory. The armory had long since ceased to be an actual depository for weapons and was now a collection of elaborately decorated reception rooms, spaces for art exhibitions, and a fantastically big “drill hall,” an enclosed space that looked like it could be used for the reception after a royal wedding. From the outside, it was a massive redbrick structure fronting on Park Avenue, conveniently just a block from the nearest Starbucks on Sixty-Sixth Street.
Convenient, Cruz thought as she balanced a cardboard drinks carrier and a paper sack of muffins and set them in front of the serious young Honduran. He sat at an ornate walnut desk beneath oil portraits, looking like he might be playing an updated Bob Cratchit role in A Christmas Carol, a hunched, focused person with a phone wedged against one ear and a laptop open on the ancient desk.
“Weapons. Yes, weapons,” Edilio said into the phone. “Guns. Stun grenades.” He was nodding as someone at the other end of the line read off a list. “No, no body armor. Tasers, sure. But what I really want are flamethrowers.”
Every day it gets weirder, Cruz thought, and walked down the corridor and into the echoing drill hall where Malik sat at a long card table with a police officer at his side with her own laptop open, taking names and running criminal background checks. There was a short line, very short, six people. And only two bore the telltale marks of ASO-7.
Cruz handed Malik a latte and the police officer a chai latte.
“How’s it going?” Cruz asked.
Malik rolled his eyes.
Word had gone out that the Rockborn Gang were talking to anyone who had acquired powers following the fall of ASO-7. So far, Cruz knew, Malik had interviewed eight aspiring supers, though only one had had actual power, and that power had been the ability to become translucent. Not invisible, just translucent.
Malik had gently suggested that the ability to show people your internal organs might not be quite what they were looking for.
Another had insisted he could freeze time, but it turned out all he could really do was stand still and hold his breath while time marched on.
“I saw Macbeth here.” Simone had come up behind Cruz and accepted a hot tea. “It was good.”
“Here in this giant space?” Cruz asked.
Simone nodded, and gazed up at the arched honeycomb ceiling. “It was impressive.”
“The good old days,” Cruz said sadly.
“Yeah. New York is a city full of survivors, but what’s happening now . . . Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“If you walk with me to find Dekka. I am not bringing that girl cold coffee.”
They walked back across the endless floor, steps echoing.
“You’re trans, right?”
“Yep.” Cruz braced for something stupid and told herself not to overreact.
“And everyone’s okay with that?”
“You aren’t?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Simone said quickly. “No. I just was wondering how they’d react if I told them I was a lesbian.”
Cruz laughed. “Simone, half of us are from Chicago, Armo’s from Malibu, and Francis has been living with her meth-head mother and a biker gang out in the Mojave. We’re none of us real judgmental. Not to mention Dekka.”
“What do you mean about Dekka?”
Cruz heard something in Simone’s voice that Simone probably did not intend on anyone noticing. A bit too much interest, concealed poorly by a bit too much nonchalance. She resisted the urge to smile and said, “Well, you know she’s a lesbian, too, right?”
“Is she?”
That was a palpably false question, Cruz thought. “Yep.”
They reached a stairwell and began to climb. “She’s impressive, isn’t she?” Simone asked.
Cruz stopped mid-flight of stairs, turned, and said, “Dekka Talent is impressive in just about every way a human being can be.” She started trudging back up and out of sheer mischief added, “Lonely, though, I think.”
“Oh?”
Oh, she says, like she doesn’t really care?
“Dekka is one of these people who had one great love in their life. The girl died in the FAYZ, and Dekka still carries her picture wherever she goes.”
“One great love,” Simone muttered under her breath.
“Yep. I don’t think she’ll ever get over it, either,” Cruz said. “Although, I think if the right girl came along . . .”
Simone’s answer was a grunt. Then she snapped her fingers and said, “I just remembered, I have a thing to do. Downstairs.”
“Ah.”
Simone fled down the steps, and after a bit more climbing, Cruz emerged on the walkway that circled most of the building, a walkway defined by the raised roof of the drill hall on one side, and the crenelated redbrick front wall on the other. Dekka was on the north tower roof, a rectangular space that looked down on Park Avenue and Sixty-Seventh Street.
“Here you go,” Cruz said, and handed her a coffee.
“Thanks.”
“Whatcha doing up here?”
Dekka let go a long sigh. “Trying to think of something brilliant.”
“Might help to talk about it.”
“What are you, the resident therapist now?” Dekka affected a growl, but by now Cruz knew when Dekka was really annoyed and when she was just playing tough chick.
“Three hundred bucks an hour,” Cruz said.
Dekka was silent for a while, sipping her coffee. “I’m out of my depth,” she said at last. “It’s been what, like, twenty-four hours since we even decided we’re a group? Now we’ve got a mission statement, and a headquarters—”
“I like to think of it as a lair.”
“Uh-huh. And Malik is interviewing people like we’re Macy’s looking for some temps. Edilio’s organizing and hunting for weapons. Shade is downtown taking care of some lunatic who morphs into the image of Jesus and says he’s Jesus and he can heal the sick. Last I heard, he was offering to cure cancer for ten thousand dollars a pop.”
“White, blond, blue-eyed Jesus?” Cruz asked.
Dekka gave her a wry look. “Of course. Swedish Jesus. Just like all the paintings. Crazy, but since he’s a mutant, I guess he’s our business.”
“Where’s Francis?”
“The Statue of Liberty. Her and Armo. They wanted to play tourist.”
Cruz was immediately hurt that Armo had not asked her to go with them. Then again, she’d been running errands, and Armo was not known for his patience. If he’d decided to go, he would go. Immediately.
Still . . .
“The Jesus thing, it’s all over social media,” Cruz reported. “Not this particular guy, but several people who were sprayed by ASO-7 and think it’s stigmata.”
“Stig what a?”
“Stigmata. It’s when people have markings that look like Jesus’s crucified hands.”
“Oh, good,” Dekka said dryly, “because I was worried we might be running short of crazy people.”
Cruz lingered, sensing that Dekka still wanted to talk, an event about as rare as Halley’s Comet.
“The thing is, I don’t know what we’re doing,” Dekka confessed. “We’re six, well, seven people, with weird abilities, but it’s like suddenly people are looking to us to fix things. I got news for those people: we aren’t that strong. We do not have the power to save the world. We barely saved Vegas.”
A long, thoughtful silence. Cruz let it build.
“Now we’re talking about bringing in more mutants? I’m not a general; I’m not some big organizer who should be running this.”
“What about this Edilio person?”
Dekka shrugged. “Edilio’s great. I trust no one more than him. But his job is organization; he’s not really a leader and he knows it. The thing is, even a natural leader like Sam . . . I mean, this isn’t the 314 square miles of the FAYZ; this is the whole country. The whole planet.” She turned for the first time to look at Cruz. “We’re not going to win, Cruz. We can’t.”
“We can try,” Cruz said.
“So we can be good little avatars in some alien’s simulation?”
“Oh, that,” Cruz said.
“Yeah: that. If that’s what we are, a sim, a program, if all this is fake . . .” She waved a hand to encompass Central Park and the larger city. “Then why are we bothering?”
“Nothing’s really changed,” Cruz said. “Look, I believe we were created by God. If I find out God created some aliens who created us, well, okay, that’s pretty weird. But we are still us. You know? The sun is in the sky, donuts taste good, and there’s another Star Wars movie. You know?”
Dekka was silent again, shaking her head slowly, side to side. She heaved a heavy sigh and said, “The four guys at the Pine Barrens? They’re still alive. The mayor updated me. Us. Texted me, anyway. They tried shooting them full of opioids to reduce the pain. Didn’t work.” She turned to make eye contact. “They just scream. It’s hell. That’s hell, right? Eternal torment without the escape of death?”
Cruz put her hand on Dekka’s arm, the first time she could remember touching Dekka. “Sweetie, there is a whole lot of pain and horror coming from this. People all over the country. All over the world. It’s awful. We can’t help all those people. We can only do what we can do.”
“It’s never going to get put back together, is it? The world. The country. Our lives. This isn’t the FAYZ; we’re not trapped in some dome hoping to get out and thinking everything will be fine if only we can escape. It’s never, ever going back to normal, is it?”
Cruz wanted to argue. She wanted to dismiss Dekka’s despair and cheer her up. But when she thought of lying, she just didn’t have the energy for it.
“No, it’s not,” Cruz said.