"So let me get this straight," Natalie said. She was leaning back in her chair, gesturing with the quarter of cucumber sandwich in her hand, "You like someone besides Joseph, and he isn't the one who's upset about it?"
Beside her, Fatima was holding her cup of coffee against her chest, more to warm her hands than anything. Today her scarf was green with yellow highlights—she was the one who had gotten Chara so invested in shawls. "I don't see how any of this is news," she said, "Chara's obsessed with a superhero? She's been doing that since middle school."
"It's kind of complicated," Chara said. She ran her finger over the sauce on her plate, then stuck it in her mouth to suck it off. "I think—Joseph is a strange person. He isn't jealous at all."
Olivia grabbed another scone from the platter in the center. She'd cut her hair short recently, and that made it easier to see her earrings. Today they were shaped like penguins. "I actually don't care," she said, "So long as you don't keep ditching us. Somebody pass the clotted cream?"
"I don't agree," Natalie said. She grabbed the small glass bowl of cream and handed it over.
"What else do you want her to explain?" Fatima said, raising an eyebrow, "This might be the most I've heard Chara say at a time."
"Huh?" Natalie said, staring. Then she shook her head. "No—I mean, I disagree about Joseph. He's plenty jealous. You should have seen him at the Artex convention—I could swear he was glaring at everyone who so much as looked at her."
Chara blinked. "Are you sure?" she said, automatically. But now that she was considering it, she realized that she wouldn't have noticed. Too many other overwhelming things had been happening at the time.
"Are you ladies doing alright?" the waitress asked, hands on her hips.
Chara looked up and froze. This time, the waitress had her hair pulled up in a ponytail, hanging free down her back, and her black shirt had the restaurant logo embroidered on one side. But the rest of her was the same. She was the janitor from Auge Island.
Olivia glanced up from her scone. "Oh thanks, but I think we're good!"
The waitress met Chara's eyes—then she looked back across the table. Fatima was putting another cube of sugar into her coffee and Natalie was confirming that they still had an unused stack of napkins. Only Chara was looking, only she had the right point of view to see how the waitress moved her left arm, stuck out her thumb and pointer finger, and set her hand against the back of Olivia's head like a gun.
"Are you sure?" Irradiance said.
Chara stood up. The movement was jerky, her chair scraped back against the floor. "I need—I have to go."
"The restroom is just back that way," Irradiance said. She pointed back to the corner of the room—her hand moved away from Olivia's head. "I can show you."
Nodding, Chara stepped to the side, away from the table and out into the aisle. Fatima was watching her, eyes narrowed, but nobody else had noticed anything. And Irradiance's arm was still held out, stretched over the other people dining in the room, pointed toward that corner. How many people could the ceiling crush if she took out the support beam there?
Chara moved forward, feet light and head fuzzy, past Irradiance and across the room. She might have been floating. This didn't quite feel real. She needed to snap out of it, snap back into the room around her. She couldn't let anyone get hurt.
Irradiance's footsteps followed her.
When they rounded the corner and stepped under an awning into a back room, Irradiance set a hand on Chara's shoulder. It wasn't a tight grip, but Chara let it guide her forward, past the bathrooms and out the back exit. No alarm sounded. Outside, the sky was just off from its midday color, muddied by the faintest drop of sunset. There were cars on the street and people on the sidewalks. Irradiance let her arm drop, reached down and took Chara's hand in hers. They walked down the road together for a while.
Chara tried to school her face and let her free arm hang limp. She didn't want anyone to interfere who didn't know what they were dealing with. She didn't want to give away the phone still sitting in the pocket of her dress.
After a few minutes, Irradiance pulled out a key fob and clicked it, and the car parked on the street beside them came blinking awake. She let go of Chara's hand to open the passenger door for her, and Chara sat down inside of her own accord.
There was a fog settling down over her, a spider creeping up between her shoulders. It was an old feeling, one she'd almost forgotten—but familiar all the same. She'd never quite put a word to it, never noticed its presence until one day it was gone, but it was coming back to her now with a sickening clarity. This feeling of helplessness, this conviction of doom—this was the color the whole world had been in her childhood. This was the way that things were before she married Joseph.
Beside her, Irradiance finished adjusting her seatbelt, looked over her shoulder, and pulled out into the street.
Irradiance led Chara in through the doorway, one hand tight around her upper arm.
Chara stood staring while Irradiance locked the door behind them. They were in an apartment—a very nice one, with a view from the balcony down over the city. They had come a long way up in the elevator.
When Irradiance finished securing the premises, she pulled Chara forward again, still wordless. They skirted the living room and came into a guest bathroom. From her apron pocket, Irradiance produced a set of handcuffs, and she cuffed Chara’s wrist to the metal shower rail. Then she left.
The bathroom was cute: the hand towel and the soap dispenser matched the accent color on the wall. But there was no towel hanging on the bar, no rug on the floor. Those items would have completed the look. Without them, it would be easier to clean up a mess.
There was a distinct sort of thwop...thwop in the distance, the exact sort of suction noise a fridge door makes when it opens, holds for a while to let you peer into the depths, and then closes again. Footsteps, and then a faucet turned on.
Chara blinked. There’d been a kitchen on the other side of the living room. It made a dreadful sort of sense—Chara herself was always hungry when she came back from running errands. She could imagine herself as a bag of broccoli from the farmer’s market, or a rare-ish art supply that could only be bought from a store open on Thursdays. Now that she’d been set in her proper place, there was no need to deal with her right away.
The faucet turned off. A minute later, the microwave beeped.
Chara drew in a breath and let it out again, steady and quiet. She didn’t want to be broccoli. She always forgot about it, and it got wilty and yellowed on the edges. But she wasn’t sure what she could do to object. The cuffs were metal, the links of it too thick for her to bend without pliers. Carefully, she moved forward, stretching out her arm to reach the cabinets. The drawer nearest her wasn’t a drawer at all, but a fake wooden plating made to look like one. The cabinet under it was empty. Chara bit her lip. It didn't matter—most people probably didn’t keep jewelry-making pliers in their bathrooms anyway.
The microwave beeped, and then quieted again. She heard the door open, the footsteps as Irradiance walked to another corner of the kitchen. She could feel the noise in her stomach, stinging through her, a clock ticking down. This was when she needed to think of something clever that would let her escape—that’s what she would do now if she were in a storybook. But there was nothing else here for her to work with, and the only thing she’d brought with her was her phone, and she was too afraid to touch that. If Irradiance walked in while she was trying to break the handcuffs, then that was expected. If she came in and Chara was texting, she’d throw the phone away and take her somewhere else. And by now, her friends would have realized something had gone wrong, and someone would be coming to find her. They’d need the signal.
She was going to have to stand here and wait it out.
A few minutes later there was a clatter of dishes in the sink, a brief run of the faucet again, and then Irradiance was walking toward her. Quickly, Chara tried to think of how she should look when she turned the corner—but then her mind went blank, and she froze standing there, not quite in control of the face she was making.
Irradiance walked through the door and sat down on the corner of the sink counter nearest to Chara. She tilted her head to the side, considering her. One of her legs kicked absently, heel tapping against the cabinet door beneath. “Finding everything satisfactory?” she finally asked, “Any beverage spills?”
Chara opened her mouth, and then closed it again. All her words had dried up. She was a fish out of water.
“Look,” Irradiance said, dropping down off the counter, “I can see you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. But this doesn’t have to be difficult. This isn’t anything scary—I just want to have a conversation, get to know each other. And then you can go. Sound alright?”
Chara swallowed the air in her mouth. Then she nodded.
“I can start us off,” Irradiance continued, “You’re Chara, wife of Joseph Bar-David, one of the most influential men in the city. You’re used to getting your way. When Zephyr came to ask for help accessing company records, you were caught up in the excitement. You thought you could be a part of his good deeds. You thought you could oblige him without consequence. You’d never had a real consequence before.”
Chara nodded again, just barely. She didn’t want to interrupt this train of thought—if Irradiance would just keep telling her who she needed to be, then she could become that person for as long as it took to get out of here.
“I don’t mean to break that streak," Irradiance continued, "But I’m going to need you to cooperate—you can’t go on doing whatever you please. There are other interests at stake.”
“I understand,” Chara said, quiet. Internally, she was kicking herself. She’d been so wrapped up in freaking out about Zephyr that she’d never stopped to consider Irradience’s motives. She’d been at the warehouse before, and at the island convention, both times fighting against Zephyr. Had she been hired by the other shareholders to defend the company against exposure? Had Zephyr known that already—or more importantly, had Joseph?
She could tell Joseph later, at least.
Irradiance reached for the drawer near the door, farthest from Chara, and—obnoxiously—it opened. “So!" she said, pulling something out, "Tell me what information you gave him, and how you got it.”
Chara opened her mouth, and the words came out grainy, corse and forced through. “I don’t know—I never—”
There was a flash, and her cheek stung. She raised her hand to feel it, the chain clinking along the rail as she moved her wrist. She could only piece it together backwards, like a detective at a crime scene—Irradience's arm lifted, her finger pointed, the ring in her ear where the laser had gone by. It had been a precise shot—or else, very lucky.
Irradiance let her arm drop. She opened her other hand, revealing the object she had pulled from the drawer. It was a bottle of red nail polish. Unscrewing the top, she began to paint her thumb.
Chara took a breath, in and out. She'd realized what she needed to do. And she knew Joseph would forgive her, wouldn't hold it against her in the first place. But there was still a dread under her ribs, the thrill that came with sneaking, with reaching out your hand and grasping something that shouldn't have been yours.
"It wasn't that kind of partnership," she said, "We were having an affair."
Irradiance blinked, looking up from her task. "Huh. Well then—I believe you. Forgive me for presuming otherwise."
"It's alright," Chara said, feeling oddly magnanimous.
"We can forget about the company data," Irradiance said, leaning back against the counter, "Tell me about Zephyr's weaknesses."
Chara's mind spun. She actually felt more comfortable with this question—she didn't know any secrets about Zephyr, but she could make a decent guess on the answer by extrapolating from the fights she'd watched.
"Water," she finally pronounced. She was sure she'd seen him fight in the rain before.
"No it's not," Irradiance said, face narrowing again, "I've fought him in the rain."
"That's why he wears a costume that's covering his whole body—with the clear faceplate and everything," Chara explained. Most heroes showed at least a part of their face.
"His costume is cloth," Irradiance countered, but she looked like she was starting to consider it.
"It's slick, like a raincoat." Chara said. A wad of dread knotted up in her stomach—even though she'd made it up on the spot, she was starting to convince herself. What if Zephyr really did have some alien biology sensitive to water specifically? She'd really be messing up his life right now.
"Interesting," Irradiance said. She wasn't shooting any more lasers, which seemed a good sign. "What do you know about his personal life?"
"Not much," Chara said. It might not be the safest way to go, but she didn't think she could invent an entire support system on the spot. "I'm not sure—I don't know if he had anyone else."
Irradiance shrugged and went back to painting her nails. "It was worth a shot."
They both stood there in silence for a moment. Chara could hear water running through a pipe somewhere—evidence of some other tenant, unaware of what was going on above them. Irradiance didn't say anything else.
"Um—so," Chara started, hesitant, "If there's nothing else you need from me—"
"Did I say that?" Irradiance said, looking up again. "I don't think I said that."
"Ah, sorry," Chara said. She shouldn't have presumed. "What else did you want to know about?"
Irradiance smirked. "Oh, I don't need you to do anything."
Chara grabbed onto the shower rail, letting her forearm rest on and behind it. She didn't quite know where this was going, and she didn't like that.
"He faltered, you know," Irradiance said, "In our last fight, when I said your name."
"What?" Chara said. That didn't make any sense. She'd never even told Zephyr her name in the first place.
"It wasn't obvious," Irradiance continued, "I doubt the news team even caught it—but I knew. I knew what I'd—"
There was a noise from the living room, a sort of clattering and a click. Chara looked, and just past the border of the bathroom doorframe she could see the end of the front door swinging slowly open, as if pushed by a breeze.