When he got down to taking notes on their final moments with Aizel, he flipped back a few pages and added “drone-like abilities” and “child’s voice” to the list of abilities. Then he jotted down Aizel’s last blurts—Here we go again and I know you are but what am I.

He sat and stared at them.

The kitchen sink dripped. A helicopter circled on the outskirts of audible.

He underlined here we go again.

So this had happened before.

There had been other Aizels? Other, what would you even call them, teams of … hosts? Caretakers?

If it had happened before, that meant it might happen again.

It could already be starting over.

But it wasn’t his problem; it would choose different people next time.

Unless he maybe did something about it? Like volunteered?

He’d be crazy to do that. Mad as a hatter. Certifiable.

He strained to see if he could still hear the helicopter—maybe he’d imagined it?—and felt weighted in his chair, as if being pulled by an anchor to a shipwreck realization: they’d destroyed the device but not Aizel, the delivery system but not the program.

He grabbed his phone and held it for a moment.

They should lock him up and throw away the key.

He opened up his text window with Aizel and saw a text from last night that he hadn’t seen. Had he missed an alert in the middle of all the chaos? The time stamp put it as coming through right around when Marwan had destroyed the device.

It was marked as read even though Eli hadn’t read it. And it was sent only to him, not the others. Was it so that he would find it only later?

Alone?

It was an address.

Quickly, before he changed his mind, he texted her—Are you out there? Are you at this address?—and waited.

Marwan

MARWAN

He’d gone through the motions of getting ready and going to school, but when he got there—late by twenty minutes, which would have meant a trip to the main office—he couldn’t bring himself to go in. So he’d headed back to Thirty-Fourth Avenue, which had a bike lane, and he took that to the waterfront, where there were still more bike lanes and where he could ride for a good long while. But that hadn’t felt right either, so when he hit the Con Ed plant, he turned around and circled back to the auto body shop.

This was all Christos’s fault, and the temptation to retaliate was back and had gotten stronger—like it had been training in hiding in a boxing gym somewhere this whole time and was now ready to get into the ring.

It would be so easy to walk the whole lot and use the tip of his restaurant key to leave a nice deep groove on every single car there.