Harken

24 Arleta

There are some places in the world that time seems to have no hold over, like an immortal paradise gated away from ruin or corruption. Wars might have raged and secret battles might have been fought in its very midst, but Arleta continued to stand like a beacon to me, a lighthouse even in the glaring sun of midday.

My feet brushed against the familiar grass of my old backyard as my flight came to a stop. Tall weeds had popped up since the last time I’d mowed it—back when I’d lived there, not so long ago. There was no silence here, always a car struggling to start or a garage door rumbling open or a dog barking at passerby. All the sounds blended together like a song, like a soundtrack to my life. My former life.

As if to signal how far away my old life really was, the silver Blade in my hands caught the sunlight, its sheath glimmering into my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to let it out of my sight—rarely even risking putting it down. I knew the Guardians were scrambling to regroup and would not attack, at least not now. Still, I held on to it tightly.

My heart pounded a little heavier. I stared across the yard at what remained of my house. With the sun’s rays glowing around its edges, my house stood in the form of three remaining walls leaning in on each other precariously, the wooden porch caved in on itself and brick pieces scattered all over. All the windows were busted and the back door was mangled in three pieces, our roof having crumbled into splintery boards. Yellow police tape waved around the parameter.

I drew closer, stepping lightly on the circular pieces of concrete that my mom had put out as decoration between the porch and her tomato garden. How are you feeling? I asked myself. I was puzzled by my reactions: calm, composed, not at all what I’d feared to see from myself on the flight back to this place. Perhaps in the days that had passed between Wyck’s death and our escape, I’d finally come to terms with how much my life had changed.

But now wasn’t the time to think about that. Now, I was standing in front of the broken door, peering in as the stubborn smell of smoke wafted into my nostrils, propelled by the ashes that flew in every gust of wind. The breeze whistled through the windows and the hole in the ceiling. Our old wallpaper and sheetrock was blackened in most places. Everything became eerily calm, in contrast to the blazing madness I’d faced the last time I’d been there.

I pressed on. What remained of the furniture was lit by the newly added skylight. The couches and chairs were tattered down to their springs and stuffing, pillows littering the floor and picture frames fallen from the walls. Our chimney had fallen through the hole in the ceiling and was sitting in the center of the living room television.

It was like walking through a mausoleum, everything around me already dead.

The pile of wood and sheetrock that had once covered my mom’s body was moved and gone. I figured that the city had already arranged for her burial. I tried to not look toward the last spot I’d seen her in. As my courage grew, I started to climb the stairs, cautious for any moment that they might break. I inched my way around the holes on the balcony. Light streamed in through every opening in this shattered structure, appearing as golden beams against floating bits of black paper and cinders that my steps stirred up.

My bedroom door was ajar. Floorboards creaked under my shoes as my hands brushed down the wall and the still-embedded nails that’d once held up our framed family portraits. Was I ready for this? I’d been preparing myself for days. I pushed the door in.

It creaked with a familiar sound, coming to a stop when the handle hit the wall. I entered, holding on to my dresser for support as my shoes slipped against the mess of papers on the ground. I looked down and saw that I had stepped onto one of my faces, one of the photographs that had been my Great Work: a Glimpse from the Joy wall.

I let my eyes run along what remained: the desk that was broken through the middle. The plastic and metal camera lenses all in a great pile of ruin. The tall photo lights toppled and looking almost like a pair of dead praying mantises. My bed, its mattress struck through the middle by a ceiling beam with its downy filling drifting across the sheets.

And pictures. Dozens and dozens of photographs of faces on paper half burned and half remaining, still stuck to the walls like the friendly ghosts of my past. Some of them had half a face, others were missing their necks or scalps, but my old friends seemed to all look up at once, to grin or scowl or beam at me like they had for so many years.

They were ruined and disfigured, but they were still alive to me. It made me smile.

Suddenly, I spotted an object that had fallen beneath my bed, shielded under where the mattress and rail had broken. It was my tiny pocket camera. I had a habit of setting it beside my bed some nights, and somehow—by glorious chance—it had managed to hide from the fire and the police and everything else that had raged against this house.

I hurried to the bed and sat down on it as best I could, sweeping the camera up. Its outside was scratched but luckily the lens was retracted into the shell. I wiped soot off its surface with the fold of my shirt and reached for the power button. The camera gave a click and at first I thought it was dead, but then the lens whirred and popped out.

I lifted it up and to test it, snapped one picture. The flash lit up my room and sent another thrill of joy through me. I pressed the review button. The screen immediately changed to show the most recent photograph on the hard drive—it still worked!

Then, at a sudden urge, I clicked the button to go back. The photo unexpectedly changed to one of my sister.

Alli was standing at the corner of a street, head turned away slightly like she had whirled to avoid my lens. But the exposed half of her face was covered in a smile, because she had been laughing as I had struggled to get a snapshot of her. I remembered this scene perfectly—this was the last walk home from school that I had gotten to have with her before…everything. My sister’s face was untainted by fear. This photograph was purity.

I looked around the room at the tatters of the photos on the walls, at everything that remained of my Great Work. I could replace it. I was certain that this was not the end.

There was a creak from the doorway and I looked up quickly. When Callista leaned her head in, I relaxed.

“How’s Alli?” I asked her. She held rolled up papers in the crook of her arm, already studying the walls with astonishment as she stepped inside. She’d never been here before, never seen my Great Work, and I guessed that my description of it had paled in comparison to the real thing. She stammered before she managed to answer me.

“She’s alright,” Callista replied. “Thad called and said she’ll be fine. He’ll probably break her out of there tonight.”

I grinned slightly. Thad’s idea was to take Alli to a small town hospital many miles from Los Angeles. They’d treat her first before asking who she was, or any of the other questions that would follow upon her identification: like how the girl that Michael Asher had supposedly burned to death was, in fact, still alive. We’d be long gone before anyone discovered who Alli was, and she’d have been treated by then.

Callista was enthralled by my photos. She stepped in so that she could see them better, turning in a circle to take it all in. She shook her head and didn’t even try to disguise the wonder in her eyes.

“That’s a lot of pictures,” she said. I nodded.

“I need to get started on a new one,” I told her with a grin. I lifted my camera, snapping a flash at her, but she was quicker. Her hands blocked her eyes and face from view, even though she laughed behind them, until I gave up. She fell to sit next to me with a sigh, dropping the papers into my lap.

“These were outside,” she told me with a lifted eyebrow.

One was a newspaper with my photo on the front page. In the picture, I was being shoved into the armored truck, bloodied and handcuffed with my eyes half-closed and my mouth dangling open grossly. Half of my face was covered by an uplifted microphone from one of the other reporters.

“They call this photography?” I said with disgust. “They couldn’t snap a single one where you can see all of my face?” I fluffed the paper open. “Methinks they should have hired Michael Asher for this.”

Callista let out a light groan of apathy. The headline of the paper read: TEENAGE TERRORIST MICHAEL ASHER LABELED PSYCHOPATH, ESCAPES DURING TRANSPORT. I was really getting a lot of prefixes and suffixes to my name now: Teenager, Terrorist, Psychopath…Ninja Turtle, next? I read the first few lines of the article—the chief of investigation vowed to find me, to avenge their horribly mutilated officers found in an (unusually empty) airplane hangar, to hunt me down until I was brought to justice. There was a new crime, too: I was being accused of an electrical fire that’d burned down a mansion in Beverly Hills.

The rest didn’t seem too interesting so I tossed the paper aside. It was hard to take the media seriously when I knew the truth and how far from it they allowed themselves to venture. It made me wonder how many others had been falsely vilified like me.

There was something else underneath the newspaper. A white envelope.

I glanced up at Callista, doubting what I first believed. The expression on her face nudged me to go on. So I flipped it over and saw my name in bold letters on its front.

The envelope was torn apart in a moment, a single page fluttering into my lap. I spread it open with shaking hands:

To: Mr. Asher,

By the mere fact of you reading this, you have proven that I misjudged you in many ways. It is an error I happily welcome.

You have taken a step down a path from which you cannot turn back, an irreversible decision to remove the coat of one life and take on the armor of another. I will admit to believing you were not strong enough. But you have reminded me of a simple truth: not all things can be judged by appearances. Sometimes behind the mask of a normal person hides the face of a hero.

You have caused a stir where one has never been felt before. Perhaps it is time for the next step in the Grand Design.

Prepare yourself. Don’t trust anyone.

ANON

My hands fell slowly, letting the letter slide into my lap. I couldn’t avoid the thrill that burst from deep inside me, so much that my cheeks felt warm and my fingertips felt electrified. Anon, in his own sparing words, had voiced his renewed support of me, and all at once my failures seemed to be wiped away.

“You know, for the longest time I was sure we weren’t going to make it,” I told Callista, shrugging in an attempt to summarize all the near-deaths we’d faced, and to disguise my excitement. She saw right through me and gave another of her half-grins in return.

“Then Michael, it’s a good thing you’re hardly ever right,” she said.

My first reaction was to counter her, but I didn’t. Not long ago, such a reply would have been an insult to me, but now it was merely a reminder of all the things we’d been through, all the times that I’d thought I was in control and wasn’t. Somehow, we’d ended up alright.

“What else was I not right about?” I asked her suddenly. She looked up to meet my eyes. A burning question in the back of my mind returned, one that I’d barely realized was there until that moment. She waited for me to embellish and continue, and I almost didn’t.

“When you kissed me on the cliff,” I blurted. “Was that really just to make you feel better, or did you mean it?”

She gave that same enthralling, ambiguous smile. For a few moments, we stared at each other across the four or five inches again, the cavern between us almost bridged, if only she would drop her final piece into the center. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to do, how I wished she would react. Did I want a yes? A no? I couldn’t figure my own hopes out. So I waited for her.

Instead, with a shrug, she gathered her fallen hair back behind her shoulders.

“What do you think, Mr. Eye Guy?” she said elusively. Then she reached across to my hand and took the camera out of it. She turned away, holding it at arm’s length to snap a photo of her face, then dropped it back into my lap.

She pushed up from the bed and walked across my room. Gone again.

The moment she disappeared, my gaze shifted down to the camera, to read the ever-unpredictable truth that hid behind her eyes.