The Loop

“We need to think this through,” I said, looking at the others with concern. I couldn’t be certain what they were thinking, and I definitely wasn’t sure they were capable of thinking rationally at the moment.

“Think what through? We go in, we get Shannon, and if this Dale asshole gets in our way, well … too bad for him.” Christine sounded as mad as she looked. In the time it had taken us to get over here, she’d worked herself into something of a silent fury. I don’t know if she was trying to hide it from us, but if she was, she wasn’t doing a great job.

Lincoln said nothing, only nodded, his face hard and inscrutable.

We’d driven past Shannon’s house, looking it over and seeing nothing suspicious from the outside. Then, at my urging, we parked two streets away and approached on foot. I wasn’t sure exactly why I was being so cautious, but the fact that my power allowed me to see into the future lent my words a bit more legitimacy. I wasn’t about to tell the others that that wasn’t precisely how my power worked, or that I didn’t really have any better idea of how this thing was about to go down than they did.

On the spectrum between Christine’s gung-ho, go get ’em attitude and Adam’s stay home and do nothing approach, I found myself precisely in the middle. Lincoln was leaning more to her side right now, but that was probably only because it was his girlfriend in danger. From what little I’d gathered from off-hand comments from Adam and Harper, he was normally every bit as reserved and risk averse as Adam. Maybe more so.

I needed someone on my side if we wanted to avoid this thing devolving into complete chaos. I looked to Harper, silently pleading with her to speak up. She saw my intense look and nodded at me, smiling.

“Jaleel is right,” she said. “Christine’s power is physical, mine is somewhere in between, and Jaleel and Lincoln’s powers are totally mental—they’d be no more help in a fight than if they didn’t have powers at all. Sorry, guys,” she added.

“You’re not entirely wrong,” I said. “Although I think there’s more to it than that.” I took a breath, relaxed a bit. A bit of tension eased out of my shoulders. Everyone’s focus seemed to be back on the present moment, the conversation. I didn’t feel so rushed to explain myself.

“Go on,” said Christine, pulling her gaze away from the house at the end of the street.

“From what I’ve read, before touching an orb myself—although my own experiences back the conclusions up reasonably well—everyone who touches an orb gets a decent boost to their baseline in several key areas—”

“Strength, speed, stamina, recovery,” Lincoln interjected. In a different time, I might have been upset at him cutting me off, trying to flaunt his intelligence or knowledge. Right now, I was just happy to have him talking instead of rushing head first into a situation that could get us all killed.

“That’s right,” I said. “Regardless of what sort of power people get, they all end up physically better than they were before. Not superhuman strength, unless strength is their specific power, but at or near the limit of what an ordinary, unpowered human around their size could achieve. There have even been stories, albeit unsubstantiated ones, of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities having those things go away when they touch an orb. I don't know how much of it to believe, and a lot of people online are probably just making shit up for clout, but …”

“So all of us are useful in a fight. Or, at least, against unpowered people we would be,” said Lincoln. “But we’re not up against an unpowered person, so that could be a moot point.”

“But there are four of us and one of him,” said Christine. “We have the numbers on our side, and we could have the element of surprise if we don’t stand around flapping our gums all day.”

Lincoln ignored her. His face was growing less stony. I had the impression that a sufficiently mentally stimulating discussion could distract him from pretty much any hardship. “Harp, you said you’re ‘somewhere in between’. What’d you mean by that?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at her. “As far as I can tell, your power is just shape shifting. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t see it being useful for more than providing distractions in a fight.”

“It’s more than that, I think,” she said. “You know how Adam got the telepathy and the telekinesis?”

Christine visibly tensed at the mention of Adam. She turned away from us and stared down the street.

I nodded.

“Primary power and secondary,” said Lincoln. “Maybe two primaries. Online discourse indicates that there’s a precedent for it.”

“Okay, right. Well I think maybe I got more than just this baseline boost to my speed and strength. Earlier today, at Shannon’s office, I lifted a desk over my head. Not effortlessly or anything, but I did it. It must’ve weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“You what?” Lincoln looked at her with surprise.

“Then I ran back and forth across the office ten times. I was barely winded. And I wasn’t timing myself or anything, but I’m sure I was absolutely crushing my former 100 meter PB.”

“When did you do all this?” I asked. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, only that I was surprised no one had noticed it and she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. Harper was ordinarily one of the most talkative people I knew.

“Well, you guys were taking forever looking at that laptop, and when that stuff with the animals came up, I just couldn't be in there anymore …” She trailed off.

“I thought you just went to throw up,” Lincoln said. He said it quietly, almost to himself. Harper shot him a look that was … angry? Hurt, maybe? I couldn’t tell, but it was definitely a look.

“I wanted to, but then … I also like to get my stress out by exercising. So I just found something to lift. And then I started running. It … helped.”

“And you’re just mentioning it now?” I asked.

“Look, the truth is that this whole thing scares the shit out of me. I didn’t mention that I might have super strength because … because every added thing makes this whole nightmare a little more real, a little harder to ignore.”

“I get that,” I said. She wasn’t wrong. The excitement of having superpowers was only slightly edging out the absolute terror at being caught up in something bigger than any of us, something even my power couldn’t help me guess the end of. There was a sense—common to all of us, I think—that as long as we kept moving we wouldn’t have to face that terror. In light of that, Christine’s attitude made more sense. But then, even without superpowers, Christine was like that.

It wasn’t long ago I could have leaned on my faith to help me deal with this. Or I could have leaned on my parents, which—because of the way they examined all things in life—would have amounted to the same thing. Now I felt alone. I guess that feeling of being alone is what drives most people to religion in the first place. I could see the appeal.

“There have been musings online that people who were already in good shape—athletic, fast, strong—would get a more significant bump to those attributes if they got powers,” said Lincoln. “So it isn’t super strength, exactly—not like you’d get if the primary power you got was strength, but it’s decidedly past the point that a normal human could reach, especially at your height and weight and muscle mass.” He looked at his sister appraisingly. I thought he almost looked worried.

“Alright, so one primarily offensive power, one power that will absolutely come in handy in a fight, and two of us who are basically useless once we get in there, considering that the guy we’re up against will have the same boost to his strength and speed that we have,” I said, bringing this whole, prolonged discussion back on track.

“And in light of that, what’s the plan?” asked Christine. “Because as far as I can see, the point still stands: there are four of us and one of him.”

“And we don’t fully understand his power,” I said. “Couldn’t it be that his one power is greater than all of ours combined? If we were going up against Adam, he’d probably wipe the floor with us. He’d get into our heads and make us attack each other. He’d make us punch ourselves in the face. He’d hold us suspended in the air and leave us flailing hopelessly against nothing. Powers change the math too unpredictably.”

“Okay, well two things,” Christine retorted. “One, you're way overestimating Adam's power, I think. And two, so what? All we've seen this guy do is make some shadows. In light of that, you think we should just do nothing?”

“Of course not. I’m just saying we need a plan. We saw that can create and manipulate shadow, we saw that he can even turn himself into shadow. Christine, you can convert energy from one form to another, you can shoot blasts of heat and light from your hands. Useful against most opponents, but can you be sure it would hurt someone whose body—”

I stopped talking and stared, open-mouthed, at Shannon’s house.

“Are you guys seeing that?” asked Harper, following my gaze.

Everyone nodded. While the sun hadn’t even begun to set on the rest of the world, Harper’s house was lit as if dusk had come early to that one patch of land. And it was growing darker with each passing moment.

“Jaleel, man, I’m sorry,” said Lincoln. “I’m all for planning and playing it safe, but right now I’m going to save my girlfriend, before that house gets any darker.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said.

“Fuck yeah,” said Christine.

———————

We came to the door and Lincoln immediately started knocking and shouting Shannon’s name.

“What are you doing?” I hissed through gritted teeth. “It’s not like she’s just going to answer the door.”

Christine tried the knob, looked unsurprised to find it locked, and placed both her hands against the middle of the wooden door. “Stand back,” she said.

We stood back. There was a deep, booming sound, like thunder, like a tree being blown to bits by a lightning strike. The door splintered into several large pieces which collapsed inward.

We rushed inward and I thought I saw, fleetingly, three women seated in the kitchen at the end of the front hallway. Before my eyes could resolve what I was seeing, they were lost in shadow. And shortly after that, the shadow was upon us all.

I thrashed about, or thought I did, but I couldn't see and soon I couldn’t even feel my body. I heard whispering voices in the dark, not my own, not my friends’.

Perfect. More people to see the performance, said the loudest, most awful voice. The words were slick. They were smooth. They glided across my consciousness like ripples on a dark lake at midnight under a cloudless sky. Like oil shimmering on fresh, black asphalt.

I wasn’t just in the shadow, I was the shadow. All my hope dissipated. We’d lost before the fight even started.

Then, without warning, a blinding light cut through the shadow, through me. The silky shadow voice became first a shout of surprise, then a cry of pain and rage. I felt my body become solid again, and felt as though some giant incorporeal hand had released its grip on me. I fell from six feet up in the air and landed hard on the floor in the hallway. I saw around me a bubble of light and, within that bubble, Christine standing with her arms extended, a look of fierce determination on her face. Beyond the confines of the bubble, the shadow dominated all.

“So, I guess my power can hurt him, even when he’s a shadow,” Christine said, smirking. Behind the grin, though, her face looked strained.

“The others?” I asked.

“In there somewhere, I assume,” she said. Her voice was quiet, her concentration elsewhere. “I feel like I’m running out of energy, don’t know how long I can keep this up. Nothing in here to draw energy from.”

I looked around me. She was right, there were no other sources of heat or light anywhere within our bubble. I suspected that any energy beyond the perimeter of the bubble wouldn’t be able to reach us.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

“Sure, why not? Do you have an idea?”

Without replying I drew my arm back and hit her as hard as I could in the face. She reeled back and gave me an astonished look.

“What the hell?” She kept looking at me, and her astonishment turned quickly into rage, which in turn subsided as she realized what I’d done. The bubble of light got slightly larger, slightly brighter.

“Hit me again,” she said.

I did. I pummeled her with everything I had in me, and as her power absorbed the kinetic energy of each blow and recharged itself, she made our bubble of light that much stronger. We could hear the screams of the shadow man growing louder. They were screams of frustration as much as pain.

Soon another body fell out of the shadow. Harper.

“Hey guys, really glad we came in here without a plan,” she said.

“Seems to be working pretty well so far,” said Christine.

I was sweating and panting hard. Christine’s body was taking my energy and using it more effectively than I could have, but it was leaving me spent.

“Take over for me?” I asked Harper.

“Oh, sure. Yeah. To be clear you want me to just start punching Christine in the face?”

“Yes,” I said, too tired to elaborate.

“Yeah, no. That makes perfect sense.”

Her sarcasm aside, she did exactly as instructed. I sank to my knees and worked on catching my breath, which was made more difficult by my worry about how much air was in the bubble. It was clear that Harper’s blows really were more powerful than mine, as the bubble grew faster and brighter than when I had been the one hitting Christine. Harper, even with her probably greater starting reserves of energy, was still tiring quickly. It had been a long day, and I couldn’t remember the last time any of us had eaten. More powerful punches meant more energy output with nothing to replace it. I just hoped she’d have enough energy to lend Christine to get Lincoln and Shannon out and make us an escape route. At this point, I didn’t have much hope we’d be able to do more than that.

Without warning, the darkness receded completely. I looked at Christine, my eyes asking the question I was still too out of breath to say aloud: did you kill him?

She shook her head. Her face should have been split open, should have been pouring blood out onto the floor after the relentless beating she’d just taken. Instead she looked no different than she had that morning. I wondered if there was an upper limit to how much energy her body could absorb before actually becoming damaged. If there was, we hadn’t come close to hitting it.

Harper sat down on the floor as I struggled to my feet.

“Is it over? Where’s everyone else?” she asked.

“No, and I’m not sure,” said Christine. “And I don’t like this.”

I couldn’t be absolutely sure how long we’d been in the house, as my perception of time had been skewed while I was within the shadow, but it had still been full daylight when we’d arrived, and it didn’t feel like much time had elapsed. Now it was hard to see anything at all through the windows, like either night had arrived early, or a thin veil of the abyss had settled like a blanket over the house. The darkness looked artificial, like looking through smoke in a bottle. I still sensed there was light on the other side.

“I don’t like it either,” I said. “Let’s try to find everyone else.”

We set out in different directions. I headed toward the stairs, Christine started into the kitchen, and Harper stood where she was, looking back and forth between us.

“Are we—Do we really think splitting up is a great idea?” she asked.

“Good point,” I said. “Christine is the only one who can actually do anything to hurt this guy. We probably don’t want to get too far away from her.”

I took my foot off the stairs and turned to head back down the hallway. Looking into the kitchen, I saw the sliding glass door behind Christine that led to the backyard. A minute ago it had been merely darkening gray, now it was pitch black. The blackness unfurled itself and started moving along the floor and ceiling and through the air toward her.

“Christine! Look out!” I shouted.

She turned to look, but it was too late. She was fully engulfed in darkness. Harper and I looked on, horrified, as her body, black and featureless as oil, seemed to collapse into the shadow at her feet. That shadow had weight, substance. And as she dissolved, it grew.

“I would have permitted you to leave, you know. You didn’t have to be part of this,” said a man who stood obscured by the shadows in the corner of the kitchen. The shadows extended out of his body, writhing like ink black snakes, running over every surface.

He disappeared, and the shadows advanced on us once more. With Christine probably out of commission, there was nothing we could do to stop him. Part of me wanted to flee—the path down the hallway to the front door was still clear—but I stood my ground. Part of it was bravery, maybe, but mostly it was that my legs wouldn’t listen to what my brain was telling them to do.

I had taken my eyes off of Harper while I watched the horror unfolding in the kitchen, and when I looked back to where she had been, someone else was standing in her place. Shannon.

The shadows reeled back, as if slapped.

“How did you get out?” Dale’s voice sounded confused and upset. “Why do you struggle so hard against me? It’s pitiful. It isn’t proper. I’m giving you a place, a purpose. And you reject me?”

The woman standing before him blurred, her features melting like clay, and then resolved into someone else. His mother.

The shadows reeled back again, but not as much as before.

“Don’t,” he said. “How dare you use her persona against me?” His voice changed from hurt to angry to enraged.

It had been a good play, and I was impressed by Harper’s quick thinking, but now he seemed angrier than ever as he began advancing upon us once more.

I knew that Lincoln had advised against me using my power again, in case it gave us some false expectation of the future that led to us making the wrong decision, but it was the only tool I had in my box. I couldn’t punch a shadow in the face.

I glimpsed. I didn’t go fully into the vision. It was more like peering through a peephole than going through a door. I was still present in my body, but my senses were split in two. One set was in the here and now, one set was looking forward. And what that second set experienced left me terrified.

I saw nothing. Just blackness. At ten p.m. tomorrow night, I’d either be inside the shadow, or I’d be dead.

The shadow came upon Harper like a sphere of perfect black, a portal into the depths of starless space, a wall at the edge of the void beyond which nothing had ever existed nor ever would.

I stood motionless, watching, waiting for my turn to die.

I wanted to help Harper, but my vision had made me certain that we’d already lost. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t have the breath to do it.

The black wall came inexorably down the hall toward me. All I could do now was stand defiant and face my death with pride. At that moment, thoughts of Allah and Jannah didn’t even cross my mind. I thought only of oblivion, of becoming nothing and my parents never knowing what had happened to me. Had my faith really disappeared that completely, so quickly?

I barely heard a crashing sound, like glass breaking as I struggled to keep my eyes open, to not let go of life until I had to. The shadow finally came upon me and, rather than engulfing me, split around me and rushed down the hallway. It let out an ethereal scream.

“Get out of my head!” I heard it shout.

The blackness in the kitchen dissipated, as the majority of the shadow was behind me now. It seemed to be shrinking in size as it cowered away from something. Or someone. In the kitchen before me, standing in front of the shattered sliding door with arms extended, stood Adam.

Get behind me, he spoke in my mind. I wasted no time in complying. I had never been happier to see him. Or anyone, for that matter.

“I can feel the others in there,” he whispered as I stood behind him, my back to the open door. I hadn’t realized how oppressive the inside of this house had felt until I was breathing in the fresh night air.

“Can you get them out?” I asked.

“It’s tricky,” he said. “His mind is … hard to navigate. It doesn’t feel like anyone else’s. Especially when he’s in that shadow form. The others exist inside the shadow, and the shadow is him, his body and his mind.”

“That’s … confusing.”

“You’re telling me. I can hold him at bay, but I’m having trouble figuring out exactly how to pull them out. Thing is, I think he has to do it. As long as they’re part of him, they’re not physical. My telekinesis doesn’t work on things that don’t have substance.”

“Christine,” I said. “Her power—light, heat—it hurt him. If we could just get her out …”

Understood, he said. Christine! I know you can hear me in there, you have to fight it. You have to make him let you go!

Let her go? Permit her to leave? Why, pray tell, would I do that?

The shadow voice—the voice of Pitch, Adam informed me—tried to sound intimidating, but instead it sounded scared. Things were rapidly spiraling out of its control.

I saw Adam’s eyes glow white, and his face became lined with exertion.

The hideous voice screeched, both out loud and within my mind. Shivers ran up my arms and down my back. Something Adam was doing was hurting it—hurting him.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making him relive all his worst moments. The pain he’s caused others, the pain they’ve caused him.”

That normally would have seemed messed up to me, but I couldn’t say that this man didn’t deserve it.

Fine, take her, said the voice. Take her and leave.

The shadow was a roiling black ball by the front entryway now. It kept shooting tendrils out, as if testing the waters, looking for an avenue that didn’t cause pain and torment, then pulling them back in defeat. A tear opened in its side and Christine came tumbling out of it, falling hard on the floor.

She scrambled to her feet quickly and ran down the hall. Her face was impossible to read. Part of me thought she was going to embrace Adam, part of me thought she was going to punch him for taking so long to get here. Instead, she veered to the right, towards the kitchen appliances.

She must have been making a mental plan with Adam as she came down the hallway, because without missing a beat, Adam telekinetically yanked the stove out from the wall, ripping the power cord in half. Christine grabbed the end of the cord that was dangling from the wall, its live wires exposed. She touched the wires with her hand and tensed up as two-hundred-and-forty volts of electricity coursed through her. She held it for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, until the amount of energy she'd absorbed caused sparks to start to dance on her skin, and her whole body glowed like blue fire.

“Now you fucked up,” she said, her voice crackling like static. She turned back to the front hallway.

Close your eyes and turn your head away, I heard her voice, channeled through Adam, in my mind. I obeyed.

Through my eyelids, I saw a burst of light so intense that I was certain it would have blinded me if I hadn’t been turned away. As it was, there were bright spots still shifting in my vision when I opened my eyes again, and it took several seconds for the image of the room around me to come into focus.

When it did, I saw that the shadow man was gone. In his place was plain old Dale—or Peter, or whatever his name was. He was cowering on the floor by the front door and looking decidedly less intimidating than he had before. I couldn’t think of him as ‘Pitch’ when he looked like this.

Christine was standing over him, her arms raised above her head, a look of unbridled fury in her eyes.

From upstairs, I could hear footsteps and confused voices. I recognized Lincoln’s voice, choked with tears though it was. He was having a conversation with his sister, and another woman whose voice I didn’t recognize.

On the floor in the kitchen was the body of a woman I had never met but had seen pictures of on the computer screen in Lincoln’s bedroom. It was Dale’s mother. Adam knelt next to her and checked her pulse, put his ear by her mouth. He looked at me and shook his head. She wasn’t breathing.

“You killed your mother? You almost killed us, our friends?” Christine was saying.

“My mother deserved what she got,” said Dale. “However much of a monster you think I am, you can double that for her.” He spat on the ground.

She raised her arms higher and a bolt of electricity actually shot from her left hand and blew out the front window. Dale whimpered.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do to you. I’m going to kill you. There’s no point in lying or sugar coating it. If you try to resist or fight back, I’ll make it hurt more. Take comfort in knowing this is what’s best for you. Men like you have no place in society.” As she spoke, her voice became gentler, as if she believed she really was doing him a favor.

I stood and watched, horrified, as she placed her hands on either side of his head. His body convulsed with sobs and tears flooded out of his closed eyes, but he did not plead for his life.

Then Christine drew her hands away, looking like she was fighting against herself.

“Adam? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“You’re not going to kill him, Chris.”

“Don’t mess with me, Adam. I will kill him. He deserves it. And if you get in my way, I’ll … I’ll fucking …”

As she spoke, she stepped awkwardly backwards, away from Dale. Again, it looked like her body was working against her.

“You’ll what? Kill me too?” Adam looked at her with something like pity. “Chris, he isn’t Marco. Killing him won’t bring her back.”

I knew enough of her past—though I’d never pried and never would—to guess what he was talking about. Her sister.

She shot him a look of such pure venom that I almost believed if she had been in control of her body just then, she would have killed him. Or at least tried to.

“You think I don’t know that?” she asked. Her voice was quiet, measured. I could see it was costing her to keep it that way. “This isn’t about that. This is about … monsters like him. They can’t keep getting away with things. Hurting people. Hurting women.”

The anger had gone out of her voice. It sounded small now. Small and sad. She began to cry and Adam, to his credit, released his mental hold on her and rushed to her side to hold her with his arms instead.

I had registered this exchange distantly, through a haze of fatigue and mental exhaustion and unprecedented emotional burnout. It didn’t seem like anyone else was going to die, which was good, but it left open the question of what we were going to do with Dale.

Harper came down the stairs and sidestepped around Adam and Christine, who were lost in each other’s arms and unaware of the world around them. Trailing her with a shell shocked look on her face, holding an arm over Lincoln’s shoulders for support, was Shannon. Adam did look up to give her a curious and concerned look as she walked by. He said nothing. None of them looked to where Dale was still huddled in the corner.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

“I’ve already contacted the police and EMTs,” said Lincoln. “They’re on their way. We need to get our stories straight before they arrive.”

I nodded to him, sensing he already had a story lined up in his head. No one else acted like they’d heard him at all.

“So what I’m thinking is this: the police already suspected or knew that powers were involved, and they suspected Dale had them. What they don’t know is that Shannon was being held here this whole time, nor that her parents were coerced into saying she’d come home. They also don’t know that we have powers, and we should keep it that way. They’ll see when they arrive that Shannon’s parents are dead, Dale’s mother is dead, and Gabriela is still missing—”

“Gabriela’s still missing?” I asked. “How can that be?”

“Yeah,” said Harper. “Everyone who was shadow-ified is back now, right?”

“They should be, but … I don’t know how aware you guys were of anything in there, but I noticed some things. It wasn’t just non-existence. It was like its own place. We weren’t literally being folded into a shadow, we were being transported into some sort of shadow … place? Universe? I don’t know, but it had dimension, space, weight.”

“You got all that?” I asked, but even as he said it I thought I knew what he meant. It had been like the space in between my conscious mind and my visions. When I activated my power, I passed through that space so quickly I hardly registered it, but the shadow place was eerily reminiscent of that. Like being stuck in that liminal zone indefinitely. I shivered at the thought.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I think she might have gotten lost in there.”

“Oh my God,” said Shannon, who hadn’t said a word until now. She bent over the back of a chair and retched, but nothing came up.

“Can we get her out? Can we make him—” I indicated Dale with a nod of my head “—get her out?”

“I don’t think so,” said Adam, coming into the kitchen now. “I may have messed with his brain a little more than I intended. I think I cut off his access to his power.”

“You can do that?” asked Harper.

“I … I guess so. If you’d asked me before I would have said no, but … getting inside his brain was something quite different from anything else I’ve done with my power, and I didn’t really know what I was doing in there. I hate to say it, but I think we have to assume she's dead.”

“Fuck,” Harper said. “This just keeps getting weirder.”

I knew what she meant. A big part of me was wishing I’d never seen an orb, never touched it. In less than forty-eight hours, my entire life had been turned on its head and I felt like I no longer knew what was real. My crisis of faith had begun when I’d learned that superpowers existed. Actually getting them, though? Getting them and using them like this? I felt like it wasn’t just the supernatural or spiritual that I could no longer trust, I felt like I couldn’t trust any of my notions of reality.

“Why did you come back?” I asked Adam, changing gears into what I hoped would be a more mundane topic. “For that matter, how’d you even know where we’d be?”

He gave me a long, appraising look—unsure of how much to say, I suspected—then he relaxed and gave a small sigh and a nod, more to himself than to us, I thought.

“I … remembered,” he said.

“You what?” I asked.

“If I told you all of this has happened before, what would you say?”

“Two days ago I’d have said you’re crazy, but my definition of crazy has changed a bit since then.”

“So what?” asked Christine. “Are you saying that you have some sort of premonition power like Jaleel?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not saying I had a vision of all of this. I’m saying I literally lived it. All of it. Since a few weeks ago, I’ve felt a little off, like I was just on the cusp of remembering something important, or like I was having the most intense déjà vu.”

“Wait, a few weeks? Like before you got powers?” Harper asked.

Adam nodded. “Before I’d even heard about powers. Before the meteor shower that brought the orbs to earth.”

Lincoln was the only one who didn’t look shocked by this revelation, but then his face was an inscrutable mask. I couldn’t guess what he was thinking.

“Moments kept repeating,” Adam continued. “But I never caught the repetition until after it happened, so I wrote it off as some sort of a mental glitch. But yesterday I talked to my sister, and I had a bit of a wake up call, and … Look, it doesn’t matter. The point is, this afternoon I got to thinking about things, about how much I … I’d miss you guys if something happened, if I could have helped and didn’t. And then it was like a memory from years ago popped into my head, about me sitting in my room, thinking those same things. Another instance of déjà vu, right?”

“I’m guessing the answer is no,” I said.

“No. It would have seemed that way, but this time I remembered what came next. I remembered getting up off my ass and following your trail around town, eventually ending up here, only … In my memory I got here too late. In my memory, I …”

Adam gulped, shook his head, looked at the ground.

“But this time—today—I didn’t have to go through the whole process of figuring out where you were because I’d already done it once, at least I remember doing it once, so I just came straight here. Well, after convincing myself I wasn’t losing my mind.”

“What happened after?” asked Lincoln, a hard edge to his voice. “In your memory, what happened after you got here?”

“I was too late to help,” he said. “Christine had already stopped him, somehow, killed him. You were … angry, that I hadn't shown up to help, that … I don’t remember much after that.”

Lincoln shook his head, shook off the whole conversation. “Look, it doesn’t matter now,” he said. “Maybe we can discuss this all later, but the police will be here any minute. We need to tell them something.”

“Couldn’t we just leave?” asked Harper.

“No,” I said. “That would create a pretty mysterious scene for them when they got here. Lincoln already contacted them—”

“I tapped into a neighbor’s phone and called through that,” said Lincoln. “So they wouldn’t know the call came from here, and obviously I didn’t give them my name, but still … No, we can’t just leave.”

“Juicy crime scene like this? They’d investigate. Eventually it would come back to us,” I said. “Besides, this is Shannon’s home. They’ll want to talk to her eventually whether she’s here now or not.”

“So here’s what we say,” said Lincoln. “We don’t know anything about Dale or anyone else having powers, Shannon doesn’t remember anything that happened to her besides that he brought her and his mother here. Eventually she got free, found a cellphone, and called me. I brought you guys as … back up.”

“Won’t they wonder why you didn’t just call the police if you knew where Shannon was being held?” I asked, wondering if we shouldn’t have actually done that, wondering if Adam had been right.

“I’ll tell them I acted rashly, out of passion. You guys tried to stop me but I was insistent. We got here, overpowered Dale, knocked him unconscious. The mother was already dead when we arrived. We don't know anything about Gabriela.”

“That’s a … pretty crazy fucking story,” I said. “You sure they’ll buy it?”

“The fact is, Shannon was the victim here. We really didn’t do anything wrong. As long as we all stick to the story, they’ll let it go. They’ll think we’re idiots for trying to rescue her ourselves instead of contacting the authorities, and our families will definitely think we’re idiots, but what can any of them actually do? They'll give us the benefit of the doubt because we're just a bunch of scared, emotional kids in their eyes. And after all, we succeeded, we won. Their perp is sitting right there ready to be arrested.”

“Only one wrinkle,” said Christine, pointing down the hall. “He can tell them what really happened. I’m sure they’d be quite interested to hear his story about a superpowered deathmatch.”

“Except that he doesn’t remember any of tonight's events,” said Adam. “As of right … now.”

I wanted to ask if he could really do that, but I was quickly learning not to be surprised by anything any of us could do.