Hissing, I rubbed at my aching skull while backing out.
“Rett!”
Remembering Haz, I pulled the phone back up to my ear. “It was a stupid Goldfish,” I muttered.
Then I saw it. The wall had separated from itself. Like a door that had come slightly ajar. “The shelf,” I murmured.
“I’m dangling by a thread over here. What is going on?” Haz cried.
“I found it,” I announced as though this hidden door behind all of Hiro’s packs of nuts was the entrance to some sort of goldmine.
“Yesss,” Haz hissed. “How big is it? What’s in there? Does he have an Uzi? Ghost probably has an Uzi.”
Grasping the shelf, I tugged, and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. The second it did, a light came on inside.
“Whoa.”
“I need you to take pictures,” Haz implored. “No. Don’t do that. Pictures are just evidence.”
It was like a closet within a closet, definitely of the locker variety. And it was lined with weapons.
“Just tell me if there’s an Uzi.” Haz went on.
“No.” I confirmed. “There’s no Uzi.” I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure what those looked like, but I knew Hiro enough to know he wouldn’t have one of those. “He is his own weapon,” I said, remembering what he’d said to Tommy.
Though, there were lots of different guns, all of them black. Some of them were small and some much more menacing-looking. There were also blades of all kinds, all of them with glimmering blades.
“There are these star-shaped things,” I murmured. “I think you throw them.”
“Cool,” Haz echoed.
“And a sword. Like the big ones they use in web comics!”
“What else?”
“Grenades. Some armor. Ooh, what is this?”
I grabbed a black baton-shaped thing off its shelf and pressed the button on the handle.
“Ahh!” I exclaimed, falling back as jolts of electricity shot out like bolts of lightning. Even after they disappeared, the device still crackled and buzzed.”
Realizing Haz was calling my name but seemed rather far away, I glanced around, realizing I’d fallen back onto my ass and the phone had skittered under a shelf of zip ties, matches, and cigarettes.
I thought he quit.
Haz was still yelling, so I grabbed the phone. “I’m here,” I said. “Sorry. I dropped the phone.”
“Oh my god, what happened?” Haz asked. “Did you shoot yourself by accident?”
“Wha—”
“What in God’s sake is going on in here?” Kieran’s loud voice cut me off. “Why is the sink running? Are you trying to run up the water bill?”
“I’m on the phone,” Haz said like he was inconvenienced and not at all intimidated by Kieran’s rage.
“Are you trying to cover up your voice? Who are you talking to?”
“No one?—”
