“Take a closer look,” he insists. “Please—”
“Do you want a sweet potato or not?” the vendor demands, swatting the photo aside. “If you’re not here to buy something, then stop blocking the line.”
Ares clenches his jaw and slides the photo back into his wallet, careful not to crease it. He can practically hear the policemen’s voices echoing in his head, their pitying tone.Give it up, kid. It’s best you accept that he’s gone.
But there’s the vision, he reminds himself. His last thread of hope. He hadseenhis brother in the lake. And the visions must mean something.
He joins the crowds swarming down the steps to the subway,all of them in varying states of hunger and exhaustion. Follows them past the automatic glass gates and blinking lights signaling the next train. When the doors slide open, everyone pushes forward at once, sweaty bodies squishing against him, obnoxious elbows banging into his side. He manages to snag a seat in the corner, next to a middle-aged man in a wrinkly suit.
He’s about to close his eyes for the rest of the ride when he sees the man’s phone screen.
It’s a photo of Chanel.
A recent post, the comment section already overflowing with praise and marriage proposals. She’s somewhere sunny and beautiful, her arms stretched above her head like she’s trying to reach the sky, her white lace top sliding up with the movement. She’s smiling so wide you’d think she was getting paid for it—then again, she probably is.
He stares, somehow more jarred by her digital appearance on this man’s phone than if she had popped up next to him in person. He shouldn’t even be surprised that a stranger on the subway is following Chanel Cao; a good quarter of the national population follows her. She’s the socialite of socialites, a fuerdai known for being more than a fuerdai, seemingly destined or designed from birth to become the icon she is today: gorgeous in an obvious, aspirational way, wealthy, young, popular, well connected, with a circle of equally fun, stylish, photogenic friends. Someone who very evidently had grown up adored, who was given everything she asked for. He can’t imagine what that’s like.
But for all her fame, he hadn’t given much thought to her—not until she had seen the vision too.
And the visions had changed, once she appeared. The first few times he’d visited the lake, he’d seen himself standing alone at the Sky Restaurant, as if waiting for someone. And he’d seen the fire, the house burning down, and his little brother just across the street.
He suspects now that the person he was meant to be waiting for at the Sky RestaurantwasChanel. They were meant to cross paths, and she was meant to follow him to the lake, because once she did, new visions had surfaced.
Him shoving someone down in a boxing ring, the cavelike room dim and unfamiliar to him, his knuckles bloody.
A man with a crescent scar, slinking through the crowds at a nightclub. Club Sixty-Eight Hours,the name glowing neon pink above the bar counter.Posters advertising the club’s special new blue lagoon cocktail, available on the eighth, which is just two weeks away.
He and Chanel together at a tattoo parlor, her sitting down right beside him like it was the natural thing to do, while the tattoo artist cleaned his needles.
He can’t make sense of the visions, but the fact that they’ve grown clearer, more detailed, must mean that he’s on the right track. That all his actions so far have led him closer and closer to being reunited with his brother at the fire. Like asking his father to transfer him to Airington International, after he’d seen himself wearing the Airington school uniform in the vision.
The train screeches against the tracks, pulling him back through time.
Beside him, the man is still staring at Chanel’s photo. Then,slowly, he zooms all the way in to her chest, as if to try and see through the fabric.
Ares feels a sharp surge of revulsion, his mind flashing red. He almost can’t believe it, even as he’s witnessing it. That the man,twiceChanel’s age, has the nerve to be doing this—and inpublic.Without shame.
When the train rattles again, Ares pretends to lose his balance and knocks the phone straight from the man’s hand. It goes flying to the floor between them, where it lands with acrack.
“What the fuck?” The man scowls and picks up his phone. Ares is glad to see that the screen has shattered, a spiderweb of fissures expanding from the cracked corner. The photo is gone, the display showing nothing except tiny colored pixels.
Ares doesn’t apologize.
The man swears under his breath, but the train has slowed at the next stop, and he only glowers at Ares before filing out the door, cradling his broken phone in his hands.
As soon as he’s gone, another man takes his place in the seat next to Ares.
He’s dressed in all black—black leather jacket, black gloves, black ripped jeans, though they’ve faded to the point that they could pass as gray—and there’s a kind of restless energy to him, even as he slouches against the seat. They ride two more stops in silence when he stands up and suddenly swipes Ares’s wallet from his pocket.
He’s so fast that Ares barely sees him do it, just feels that his jacket is lighter. When he jerks his head up, the thief is already rushing out the doors right as they’re closing.
“Hey,” Ares yells, leaping to his feet. The doors slam against his shoulders, so hard that someone gasps. But he squeezes through them, tugging the end of his leather jacket free from where it had been jammed, and chases after the thief down the platform.
The thief glances back, eyes wide, and keeps running. Clearly he hadn’t expected Ares to follow. This isn’t even Ares’s stop. And maybe Ares would’ve given up, simply let him take the wallet and go, except Luke’s photo is in there.
They race through the subway station, past the throngs of commuters, then out into the night, down an empty alley that looks like the perfect home for serial killers and ghosts.
Ares ignores the needle-sharp stitch in his side and lengthens his strides until he’s just a few inches away from the thief. He reaches out and seizes him by the collar. “Give itback,” he gasps.
