I'm carrying a stack of four folding chairs toward the storage closet when I hear the front door open.

  I don't think anything of it at first. The center gets walk-ins on Fridays - people checking the food pantry hours, someone looking for a GED flyer, the occasional parent scouting the space before bringing their kid in. I keep walking with my chairs.

  "Um," a voice says. "Is there a - I'm looking for someone named Sam?"

  I stop. The chairs are blocking most of my view but I can see over the top of them. Standing in the doorway, half in and half out, one hand on the door, is a kid. Skinny, not very tall, dark hair that's longer than it was Wednesday night because it's not hidden under a hood. He's wearing a flannel shirt over a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers and he looks like any other teenager who wandered into a community center, except for the way he's standing - one foot slightly behind the other, weight on his back leg, ready to move. The stance of someone who has recently learned that exits matter.

  I know him from the eyes. Same wide, dark eyes that stared at me over a bandana in an alley two nights ago.

  "That's me," I say. I set the chairs down. "You're Marco."

  He flinches at the name. Tiny, barely visible, but I catch it. He's not used to people knowing who he is. For a second his outline does that thing - the faintest shimmer at the edges, like heat haze, his body asking should I leave should I leave should I leave before his brain overrides it.

  "Yeah," he says. "A lady in a shark thing said to come here. If I needed help."

  "That's me," I say again, and I watch it land. His eyes go to my face, my build, my height. He's doing the same matching I did - alley figure to daylight person. The voice is the part that clicks. I can see the moment it happens because his shoulders do a thing, a tiny release, like a knot loosening half a turn.

  "Oh," he says. "You're like. My age."

  "I'm seventeen next week. You?"

  "Sixteen."

  "Cool. Come on, let's go somewhere quieter."

  Mrs. Patterson is in the main office on the phone. I steer Marco toward one of the smaller rooms off the hallway - the one we use for one-on-one therapy sessions, with the couch that smells like dust and the window that faces the side alley. I close the door. Not locked. Just closed.

  He sits on the couch. I take the folding chair across from him. There's maybe six feet between us. He's doing the thing with his hands that nervous people do - picking at his cuticles, turning his phone over and over. His phone case has a crack running across the back.

  "I didn't know if I should come," he says.

  "But you did."

  "Yeah. I - the pharmacy thing is kind of..." He trails off. Starts again. "I can't go back. After Wednesday. Those guys in the cars - you said they were federal?"

  "NSRA. They've connected four pharmacy hits and they're building a physical profile from security footage. They're going to adjust their stakeout strategy and they're not going to make the same mistake twice." I don't sugarcoat it. He deserves to know what he's dealing with. "You're good at what you do, Marco, but they have resources you don't."

  He absorbs that. His phone flips over, over, over. "I wasn't trying to be a - like, a vigilante or whatever. I just wanted to stop the pills."

  "I know. Tell me why."

  It comes out in pieces. Not a rehearsed speech, not a tidy narrative - just fragments in the order they surface. I take notes in my brain.

  His cousin, Gabriel. Gabe. Twenty-four, worked at an auto body shop in Tacony, started taking Jump to handle double shifts. Normal Jump at first, the green gel caps, the standard stuff everyone knows about. Then the supply changed and nobody told him. The new pills looked different - blue and white - but the dealer said it was the same product, just a new manufacturer. Gabe took them for three weeks and on the third week he had a seizure at work and fell into a hydraulic lift and that was - Marco stops. Picks at his cuticle hard enough that I see a bead of blood.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "He's alive," Marco says. "He's in a chair. Spinal damage. The seizure hit while he was under a car and the lift..." He doesn't finish.

  I don't say anything. There's nothing to really say.

  "After that I started - I couldn't just sit there. I knew which pharmacy Gabe's dealer was getting the pills from because Gabe told me once, before. So I went there. And I went through the wall and I found the shelf and I smashed everything on it." He looks at his hands. "It felt good. It felt like doing something. So I kept going. I figured out which other pharmacies were carrying the same stuff based on the packaging and I just - kept going."

  "How did you figure out which ones?"

  "I walked in during business hours and looked. The blue and whites are always in the back, behind the counter, not in the regular stock. If you know what you're looking for it's not hard to spot. I don't know if it's like one dirty pharmacist or a whole bunch but. It's not good."

  Smart. Low-tech, no powers required for the reconnaissance. Just a kid who walks into a pharmacy and looks at the shelves. Phase-walking is only for the after-hours destruction. He's been doing better fieldwork than I gave him credit for.

  "Marco, do you know who's making the blue and whites?"

  "Rogue Wave, right?" He asks, like I'm testing him.

  "Rogue Wave makes them. But the adulteration - the stimulant that's making these pills dangerous - that wasn't Rogue Wave. It was this other organization called the Kingdom of Keys. They were cutting Rogue Wave's product at a facility in the Bellwether District to start a gang war. That facility got raided by the FBI in February."

  He stares at me. "What?"

  "The tainted supply you've been pulling off shelves is legacy product. It was manufactured before the raid and distributed before anyone knew it was contaminated. There's no active production line anymore. The pills that are out there are the last of them."

  "So I'm - it's already over? The thing I've been fighting is already over?"

  "The manufacturing is over. The pills are still out there. What you've been doing matters - every bottle you destroyed is product that didn't end up in someone like Gabe. But the source is gone. You're not fighting an ongoing operation. You're cleaning up debris."

  He sits with that. I can see it rearranging things behind his eyes - the crusade he built in his head, the righteous war against an evil machine, resolving into something smaller and messier. He was fighting a ghost. The machine already broke and nobody told him.

  "I feel stupid," he says quietly.

  "You're not stupid. You didn't have the information. Nobody on the street does - the Bellwether connection isn't public." I lean forward. "You did something most people wouldn't. You identified a problem, investigated it, and took action. You just did it alone, without support, and that's why the NSRA is three data points from your name instead of you being three steps ahead of them."

  "And you can help with that?"

  "I can try. But first I need you to understand something. If you keep hitting pharmacies, they will catch you. It's not a question of skill - it's resources. They have more. And once you're in the system--"

  The front door opens again.

  This time I hear it differently. Not the tentative push of a teenager checking if he's allowed to be here. This is a confident entry. Heels on linoleum. The sound of someone who walks into rooms expecting them to rearrange around her.

  Then a voice I recognize, and my blood goes cold.

  "Hello? We're looking for the program coordinator. NSRA - we called ahead."

  They did not call ahead. I would know. Mrs. Patterson would know.

  I look at Marco. Marco looks at me. His outline is shimmering.

  "Don't," I whisper. "We're just two teenagers having a conversation. You can't get in trouble for sitting here. This place is Switzerland."

  I don't actually know if that's true. But it stops him from doing something stupid, which is what I need right now.

  "Stay here. Do not move. You are a mentorship kid and you're waiting for a session. Your name is--" I hesitate for a fraction of a second. "Your name is Marco and you go to Lincoln and you're here because you have questions about your powers and that is the truth. Do not volunteer anything else."

  He nods. His outline steadies. Barely.

  I close the door behind me and walk down the hallway toward the front entrance, and there she is.

  Agent Sarah Jennings. Taller than I remember, or maybe that's the heels. Dark hair pulled back. She's dressed the way people in government dress when they want to look approachable but also like they could ruin your life - slacks, blazer, a lanyard with a badge she's wearing on the outside of her jacket so you can't miss it. She's smiling. It's the kind of smile that has meetings behind it.

  There's a second agent with her. Younger, female, holding a tablet. Taking notes already. Of course.

  Mrs. Patterson is standing at the front desk looking like a woman who was just told the IRS was here for a casual chat. She spots me coming down the hallway and her eyes do a thing that communicates Sam, what the fuck without any words.

  "Hi," I say, because someone has to say something. "I'm Sam. Associate program coordinator. Can I help you?"

  Jennings's smile doesn't waver. "Agent Jennings, NSRA Philadelphia field office. This is Agent Reeves. We're just here to introduce ourselves - get a sense of the programming you're running, the population you're serving. Standard community liaison." She extends a hand.

  I shake it. Her grip is firm and her palm is dry and she makes eye contact the way people make eye contact when they've been trained to make eye contact.

  "We understand you run a mentorship program for powered youth," she says. "That's wonderful. The NSRA is very supportive of structured programming for young metahumans. We'd love to learn more about what you're doing here and see how we might be able to help."

  Help. The word sits in the air between us like a land mine shaped like a gift.

  "Sure," I say. "I'd be happy to tell you about the program. Want to sit down?"

  "Let's," she replies, with the crooked crocodile smile of a woman who remembers that I embarrassed her years ago. And she hasn't forgotten.