Tasha doesn't react the way most people would react to "I think that was Ricochet."

  Most people would say what? or are you sure? or should we do something? Tasha gently ushers me towards the office, a little away from prying ears, pulls out her phone, opens a notes app, and says, "Spell the name he gave you."

  "Danny. D-A-N-N-Y. No last name."

  "Description."

  "Five-eight, stocky, dark hair buzzed short. Maybe Filipino, maybe Puerto Rican, maybe both. Construction worker, jacket, work boots. Early twenties. Stiff hands - knuckles swollen, but the rest of him is fine. No visible injuries. Wasn't bleeding."

  "And you're sure it's him."

  "Pretty sure. The build's right, the age is right, and he almost recognized my voice. He said I sounded like someone he met a while ago."

  Tasha types for a few seconds. "Ricochet was, what, two years ago? The kinetic absorption guy?"

  "Yeah. Took Jump for kinetic energy redirection, then a shot of Fly for super-strength, and then folded himself in half when Kate hit him with the taser and everything went wrong at once. That was with the Titans. And... You know. Team Mayfly."

  Tasha gives me a look. "Yeah. I remember. Did he... like, did you follow up with any of that? From what I remember that guy broke every bone in his body. I didn't know you even could come back from that. And jail time?"

  "Iunno," I say, making a sort of noncommittal shrugging sound, along with a noncommittal shrugging shrug. "You'll have to ask him, not me. I'm not going to dig into his police records. Not yet, anyway, as long as he plays nice."

  Tasha finishes typing and looks up. "So what's the play?"

  "There's no play. He came here looking for help with a friend's drug problem. He's not a threat."

  "I didn't say he was a threat. I asked what the play is," Tasha corrects me.

  "The play is we file it and leave him alone. He did his time, he's working construction, he came to a community center because that's what community centers are for. If I start surveilling every ex-con who walks through that door--"

  "Sam." Tasha holds up a hand. "I agree with you. I'm filing it. That's what filing means."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah, oh." She puts her phone away. "But the Jump thing he mentioned - the coworker getting bad product on a construction site. That's interesting. You think it connects to the phase-walker?"

  "Maybe. The Bellwether raid should have shut down the Kingdom's tainted pipeline, so either it's old stock still filtering through at street level, or Danny's friend just reacts badly to normal Jump, or there's something else going on that I'm not seeing yet."

  "Or the adulteration was happening before Bellwether and the tainted product was already distributed."

  "That's what I said. Old stock."

  "No, you said filtering through. I'm saying distributed. As in, already out there in bulk, already sold to middlemen, already in dealers' pockets across NE Philly. Bellwether was processing volume. If even a fraction of that output was tainted and made it into the supply before the raid, it could take months to work through."

  I think about that. She's right - the timeline matters. The raid was a month ago. It's April. A month of street-level inventory that was already in circulation before the feds kicked the door in. "So the phase-walker might be trying to pull it off the shelves before more people get hurt."

  "If they know which shelves to hit. Which means they either have inside knowledge of the distribution network, or they're figuring it out the same way we would - following the product backward from the bad reactions."

  That's - yeah. That's a good point. Someone doing the same investigative work I do, just with phase-walking instead of blood sense and a badge from Station 37.

  "I'll talk to Deena on Monday," I say. "See if there's been an uptick in Jump-related calls along the Roosevelt corridor. If people are having bad reactions in a geographic cluster, that maps to the same pharmacies."

  "Good. I'll keep pulling police reports. See if there's a third hit that didn't make DVD chatter."

  "Thanks, Tash."

  "Go home, Sam. It's Saturday. Go be a person. Also, don't shorten my already shortened name," she complains.

  "I'm a person," I complain back.

  "You're a person who is currently making a mental list of every pharmacy between Cottman and Rising Sun. I can see it happening," she points out. "There is a small hamster in your brain and every time you think hard thoughts I can see it running behind your eyeballs."

  She's not wrong. "Fine. I'm going home," I grumble.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "Text me when you get there."

  "I always text you when I get there."

  "And it always makes me feel better. Go," she insists.

  I go home. Saturday night right now is a known quantity - Dad's watching a police procedural on the couch, mumbling about laws while he does physical therapy stretches. Mom is reading emails at the kitchen table on her laptop, stuff that I assume is library related. There is something in the oven that smells nice, and then something on the countertop that smells nicer, which I immediately recognize by scent without needing to actually look up to look at the black and red bag full of meat smell.

  "You eat?" Mom asks, without looking up.

  "Donuts."

  "That's not eating," she dryly replies.

  "It was three donuts," I bite back.

  "Three donuts is three donuts. Sit down. We went to costco. Vegetables in the oven."

  "Are they root vegetables?" I ask.

  Mom peeks backwards. "Mostly."

  So I sit down and eat rotisserie chicken, potatoes, and carrots, and watch my Mom go on her computer and listen to my Dad explain that despite the comedy, this show is propaganda designed to get us to be cool with 'cowboy cops' as a concept, and this is - fine. This is good. This is the thing I fought for. Not the screwdriver to the carotid, not the telekinesis, and not the federal evidence handoff.

  Then, I pull the SAT prep book out of my backpack. I stare at it, and then I stare at my school binders, also located in my backpack.

  I do my homework. I start one of Tasha's SAT prep sections - the reading comprehension, because that's the one where I can focus and actually enjoy it. Verbal reasoning is just pattern recognition with words, and pattern recognition is what I do. The math sections are going to be a problem. Math has always been a problem. Concerta helps but it doesn't make calculus make sense, it just makes me able to sit still long enough to be confused by pre-calculus in an organized way.

  I take my night meds. Lithium, desvenlafaxine, prazosin. Three pills in a row with a glass of water, same time every night. Concerta in the morning so I'm not zooming through the afternoon and up at 6 am.

  I text Tasha: home.

  She texts back a thumbs up emoji and then: third pharmacy hit. Mayfair Rx on Frankford Ave. Two weeks ago. Didn't make a police report - owner handled it internally.

  Mayfair Rx is four blocks from my house.

  I stare at the ceiling for a while and then I go to sleep, because it's Saturday and I'm being a person and persons go to sleep on Saturday nights. The phase-walker can wait until Monday. Everything can wait until Monday.

  Almost everything.

  Monday. EMT shift, Station 37, 3:30 PM to 8 PM. The after-school slot, which is the one I like because it catches the tail end of the afternoon rush and lets me be home by nine.

  Deena is driving, and Hector is in the back with me. Deena drives the way she does everything else - carefully, attentively, with both hands on the wheel and her mirrors checked every fifteen seconds. She's been an EMT for six years and a paramedic for two and she treats me like a real colleague, which I appreciate more than I've ever told her. I know Hector and Deena both trust me, and everyone on the station has learned to trust my Weirdly Specific Judgement Calls about internal bleeding, but it still feels sometimes that everyone thinks I'm basically a kid playing dress-up. Deena just hands me the trauma kit and says "you're on vitals."

  Or maybe I have low self esteem? Unsure.

  We're between calls, parked outside a Wawa on Harbison, and I'm eating a soft pretzel because they are like 75 cents. I can keep 75 cents on me. In the form of dollar bills, but still.

  "Hey, Deena. Quick question."

  "Shoot."

  "Have you been hearing anything weird about pharmacies in NE? Like, break-ins, inventory issues, anything unusual?"

  She gives me a sideways look. Deena's sideways looks are less precise than Amelia's but more patient. "Define weird."

  "I don't know. Pharmacists acting sketchy. Unusual stock damage. I heard something at the community center and I'm just trying to... you know, trying to figure it out."

  "Why are you asking?"

  Hector comes out with a big ICEE and a bag full of our hoagies. "I heard the phrase 'why are you asking' and I assume Sam is asking about something weirdly specific again."

  "Yep," Deena confirms. Hey!

  "Well, you know that there was that big FBI raid like a month ago. But did that actually cut down on the number of bad Jump cases we've been getting? You guys are more active than me, this is your career and my afterschool activity. So I'm not really like in on it," I explain. "Just trying to figure out what to tell the dude next time he comes in. If we're still on like, high alert for tainted Jump or whatever."

  She's quiet for a minute, which with Deena means she's actually thinking about it instead of giving me a quick answer. The scanner crackles. Someone two districts over is having chest pain and it's not ours.

  "I don't know about pharmacy break-ins," she says. "They've been slowing down, I think. But I'm not like a number lady like your momma,"

  "My Dad," I interrupt her.

  "Right, right," she waves off. "Like your poppa. I don't know if that's like, universal, or if Hector and I just are getting lucky coin flips."

  "That's statistics, alright," I mumble.

  "I mean, less tainted Jump calls since the raid, yeah. But not super less. Like... only a handful less," Hector cuts in, counting on his fingers. "Like maybe three or four over the past month. Out of maybe... fifteen Jump related calls total?"

  "That guy in South Street?" Deena asks.

  "Right, five. Five bad Jump calls with the seizures and the suspected adulteration and everything. Here's your hoagie," Hector continues, passing a meatball hoagie to me.

  "Where were the calls?" I ask.

  "Two on Roosevelt Boulevard. One on..." She pauses, thinking. "Frankford. Near Mayfair. Rest of them were in South or Center City. But the other three were really close to each other."

  Near Mayfair. Where the third pharmacy was hit.

  "That's a tight cluster," I think out loud.

  "Yeah, I noticed. Flagged it in the shift report but I don't know if anyone upstream is paying attention. We're short-staffed and everyone's still buried in paperwork from the Bellwether stuff." She looks at me. "You're doing that thing where you get very calm and I can tell you're thinking really hard."

  "I'm always thinking hard."

  "You're not always this calm about it. What are you onto, Sam?" she asks.

  "I don't know yet," I say, and for once that's the truth. "But can you do me a favor? If any more tainted Jump calls come in, can you let me know even if I'm not on shift?"

  Deena studies me for a second. She's deciding something. Then she nods. "I can do that. But if this turns into something bigger than community center questions, you tell someone with a badge. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  "I have my suspicions that the Bellwether thing was you related," Deena points out, very frankly, very calmly. "But I don't have any way to prove it, and I'm not going to try to."

  I can't help but smile at her a little bit. Like an innocent little cherub.

  The scanner pops. Possible allergic reaction, Torresdale and Cottman. Deena pulls out of the Wawa lot and I put the pretzel between my knees and snap on gloves because that's what you do - you stop thinking about the thing you're thinking about and you go help the person who needs help right now.

  But in the back of my head, the map is already forming. Three pharmacy break-ins. Three weird Jump calls. Same corridor. And a phase-walker who seems to know exactly which shelves to hit.

  Someone's doing what I would do. And they're about two weeks ahead of me.