Miraculously, she listens and sprints down the aisle.
The third man reaches into his jacket.
No time to spare.
I grab a metal shelving unit beside us, tall, heavy, and loaded with thousands of containers. With every ounce of strength I possess, I grip the edge and yank forward and down.
The shelves tilt, hover for a fraction of a second, then surrender to gravity with a deafening crash.
Metal slams into linoleum, followed by the percussive symphony of hundreds of plastic jars shattering. A sparkling cloud of pink, green, silver, and gold explodes into the air.
A non-lethal flash-bang. A tactical distraction.
People shriek and leap away.
A woman’s basket clatters to the ground. Someone shouts for management.
Through the haze of glitter, I spot the third man backing off with his hand still inside his jacket and his eyes narrowed against the cloud of craft supplies. He can’t see us clearly.
Good.
Chloe?
Cold panic flares in my chest. Did she run to safety like I insisted, or did one of the fuckers grab her?
I scan the mess, squinting through the shimmering dust.
There.
Kneeling in the middle of the aisle, with her back to me. So much for sprinting away.
She’s hovering over a small child. A little boy, maybe three, who likely got separated from his mother in the mayhem. He’s wailing, his red face streaked with tears and silver glitter. And Chloe, surrounded by disarray and danger, ignores everything else to comfort him, completely oblivious to the fact that these assholes are here for her.
What the fuck?
Her hand gently brushes glitter from his hair. She offers him a calming smile that seems to cut through the child’s fear. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s just messy play. See how bright it is? Like fairy dust. Isn’t it pretty?”
As his sobs slow to hiccupping cries, she wipes his cheeks with her hand, streaking glitter over her palm.
For a second, I’m rooted to the floor.
Stuck in place by the sheer incongruity of the visual before me. In the middle of disaster, while people scream and flee, with armed men just feet away, Chloe stopped to comfort a frightened child. To heal instead of harm.
She’s everything I’m not.
She creates. I destroy. She nurtures. I defile. She is light. I am nothing but shadow and violence.
The absurdity pisses me off. And, still, I can’t look away.
An alarmed store manager rushes toward us with a phone pressed to his ear. “Yes, a robbery! Same as last week. This time, they tried to grab the cash drawers from the fabric station. Some guy stopped them.”
Behind him, a security guard hovers. A retired cop, going by his appearance. His hand rests on his empty hip, where a gun would have resided in his previous life. He’s staring right at us, but he doesn’t really see us. He doesn’t connect me to the men groaning on the floor or register Chloe kneeling in a pool of glitter with a child who isn’t hers.
Everyone’s attention is scattered, diffused by the havoc of shouting shoppers, sobbing children, and the whirling cloud of glitter still spinning through the air as the ceiling fans keep it aloft.
Perfect.
We’re invisible in plain sight.
