As soon as I could move, I backed away, almost tripping and falling over some loose trash. I stood guard there until Khalika emerged like a wraith through a black curtain. I was fully complicit now, I understood, and a wave of nausea nearly overwhelmed me. Khalika was cool again, looked exactly as she did when she appeared behind me at the Envy. She smiled, shoved her rucksack, containing the blunt paraphernalia of mayhem, into my trembling hands.

For just a moment I had the eerie feeling that we had merged, were as one now. I imagined I saw a double image reflected in the unfathomable pools behind the transparent lenses of her back-country eyes. I was beyond words, questions—beyond myself—as we walked in silence back to the train. The street was silent and frigid—a moonscape devoid of all life but our own.

“What just happened?” I asked, stupidly.

“Nothing and everything,” she replied. “I’m fucking with the natural order of things is all.”

We jogged to the train, caught the downtown express, and Khalika got off at the first stop, didn’t tell me where she was going or anything else. All I got was, “Be cool, see you when I see you, don’t open the door to strange men, and don’t leave my tools on the train, birthday girl. I’m serious, shove it back behind the boxes.”

Presumably, I was in charge of the evidence.

I held the rucksack to my chest, staring straight ahead. I always carry a blade, and this night was no different. I was suddenly calm. Whatever freaks were on the train would pick that up, like any other night predator. Move on… find an easier one.

I was exhilarated and nauseated, almost relieved that Khalika had split. I needed some time to process this.

My sister was a killer. I was suddenly certain she had done this before. And so what? Who had she dispatched, I wondered, who didn’t have it coming a hundred times over? Just like Dick and Bianca had it coming—that and more. I hoped she would tell me about them. Had I somehow known this all along, tucked away somewhere in the tangle of days? I knew Khalika worked in the deepest, most remote shadows, without distraction, without input from the keepers of order.

She had told me so.

“You want to unsee what you have seen and put us both in the cross hairs,” Khalika once said through clenched teeth.

I awoke to my environment like a sleepwalker and rummaged through Khalika’s rucksack. It contained the gloves, a thin wire, a loaded syringe of something, and a small flashlight. My train was empty except for a homeless woman curled up in a corner seat, arguing with somebody in a dream, taking charge of her situation.

Something is missing. What is it?

My stop. I got off and quickly covered the blocks to the loft, my querencia. I heard the far-off scream of fire engines, the impatient blare of a taxi horn, even at this hour. My watch said 4:20 a.m.

So much had happened in a couple of hours that it seemed, in hindsight, like a scene from a movie, the montage, where time must be compressed to fit the story into it. The lights faltered again, and this time remained off. In a couple of hours it wouldn’t matter. At least the electricity waited to crap out until I got off the train. Small mercies.

I pulled out the flashlight, opened the vestibule, and made my way upstairs. The antique elevator was out. I got the loft door open and entered, immediately locking and bolting the reinforced door behind me. I dropped Khalika’s equipment, peeled off my winter gear, and hung it on the rack.

After I had settled down, I realized the loft was pretty chilly. I threw on a sweatshirt and went to get a beer. Then I set a couple of logs in the old, sooty fireplace, threw some newspaper on for kindling, and lit it. I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and stuck my tongue out—way out—until it touched my chin. I smiled at my image.

Suddenly, I felt fucking great. Better than great—invulnerable almost. It felt like the first time I saw Mercutio, climbed on his back and felt his hydraulic gait. It was as if I had just discovered some occult secret. This is what it feels like to be alive, what it feels like to find what you’ve been missing.

Of course, it couldn’t last. What does? Still, it was one hell of a morning.

It hit me then—the switchblade! But when I recounted the events of that surreal scene, I realized Khalika must have wiped it and shoved it back in her jacket. I pulled mine out of my boot and put it back where I always keep it—on my nightstand.