For eleven days, Dev Malhotra was the most boring man in Queens.
He went to work. He filed claims. He ate lunch with Priya, who noticed that he had, at some point, stopped fidgeting and started sitting, and said so, and he said it was a new hobby and did not elaborate. He called Big Sal to confirm the roof schedule. He texted his mother, and Carol Calloway texted back a photograph of a brisket in a Pyrex dish captioned SUNDAY!!, and he stared at it for a long time before replying with a thumbs-up.
And every evening, and every morning, in the narrow space between waking and work, he sat on Owen's living room floor and closed his eyes.
He learned the rules by trial and error. The sense worked best in stillness. It resisted effort. If he strained for range, it collapsed; if he simply let go, it widened on its own, a slow breath at a time. On the fourth day, he felt through the ceiling into the apartment above, the silhouette of a woman on a treadmill. On the sixth day, he found the boiler in the basement, three floors down, a warm, pulsing knot. On the ninth day, sitting on the roof of his building with his eyes shut, he could feel the whole block: the shapes of the parked cars, a dog on a fire escape, a pair of teenagers making out in a stairwell that he immediately, mortifyingly, stopped sensing.
Rider (B), he thought, red-faced. Not selective.
The radius crept up. Three meters. Five. Nine. On the eleventh day, at seven a.m. on a Sunday morning, he measured it against the length of the apartment building's hallway with a tape measure and got fourteen.
It cost him. Every stretch of the sense came with a dull, pulsing headache behind the eyes, and twice he'd had nosebleeds so heavy he'd ruined a shirt. By the end of the first week he had learned to stop at the first sign of pressure behind his left eye. He respected the Rider. He respected it because the pressure in that spot was exactly where the pain had started, the last time.
He kept a log, a notebook labeled SENSE — TRIAL LOG, in Owen's block capitals. Day 6: 8 m. Headache after 20 min. Day 9: 11 m. Nosebleed at 35 min. Do not push past 20. It was, he realized, the most methodical thing he'd done since his last regression suite.
It's useless, he told himself, more than once. It's a blind man's cane with a nosebleed. I can't fight with it. I can't stop a bullet with it. All it does is tell me where things are.
Then, on the twelfth day, the market happened.
The Corona Plaza Sunday market was a wall of noise and color under the elevated tracks: stalls of fruit and phone cases and steaming pots of elote, mariachi music from a speaker on a folding table, vendors shouting prices in three languages. Dev had come for pastries. That was the whole reason. Carol had asked him to bring something to dinner in Ridgewood, and the Colombian bakery on Roosevelt was the only place Owen's memory trusted.
He was standing in line, holding a paper number, when the thread pulled.
NOTICE. URGENCY: HIGH. DISTANCE: 28 M.
He stiffened. He'd been getting Notices for two weeks now, small ones, an elderly man struggling with a cart, a woman crying on a bench, a boy with a skinned knee. They came a few times a day, and he'd learned to sort them. Some he could help, and some he couldn't. Some were just the plain, human weight of a city.
But this one was loud. It thrummed in his sternum like a struck wire.
He stepped out of line. Twenty-eight meters. That's outside the sense's range. He'd need to close the distance. He moved through the crowd, following the pull, past a table of embroidered blouses, past a man selling mangoes on sticks, into a packed aisle between two rows of stalls.
DISTANCE: 19 M.
The thread tugged left, sharply. He turned. The crowd here was dense, a churn of shoulders and shopping bags and strollers, and he couldn't see over it. He shut his eyes, right there in the middle of the aisle, and let the sense open.
Three meters. Five. Nine. It was a strange way to see. Not eyes; outlines. The crowd resolved into a moving mass of shapes, each with its faint golden edge: a man with a broad chest, a woman with a stroller, a teenager with a phone. The bodies jostled and separated and re-formed like a school of fish. Nine meters. Eleven. The pressure behind his left eye began to grow.
DISTANCE: 12 M.
And then, at the edge of the range, he felt it.
It was small. It was very small. A single, tiny shape, moving alone through the forest of legs. And around it, like a halo, like a smell, was something he had never felt before and knew at once: panic. Not sound. Not sight. The sense had brushed against something raw and shapeless and huge and terrified, something that hadn't yet learned the word for what it felt.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
A child, he thought.
He was moving before he'd finished the thought, pushing through the crowd with his eyes half closed, guided by the sense like a hand on a wire. Someone swore at him. He didn't slow. The pressure behind his eye sharpened to a needle. He clamped his jaw against it. The shape ahead, small and trembling, turned, and turned again, and started to run.
DISTANCE: 7 M.
He broke out of the crowd into a wide clearing between two tarp-covered stalls. A little girl stood in the center of it, three years old, four at most, in a yellow dress, her hair in two crooked braids. She had a half-eaten churro in one hand. Her face was scarlet and streaming. She was turning in slow circles, screaming a single word, over and over, in a voice too hoarse to carry.
"Mamá! Mamá! Mamá!"
Dev dropped to his knees in front of her. The headache hit him like a hammer, a bright white spike behind his eye, and for one terrible second the world went blurry at the edges. He gripped the ground with his fingertips and breathed.
Not now. Not now.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. Hi. Hi, sweetheart. What's your name?"
The girl stared at him, hiccuping. "Mamá—"
"I know. We're going to find her. I'm Owen. What's your name?"
A long, wet sniffle. "...Luz."
"Luz. That's a beautiful name. Luz, can you be brave with me for a little bit? Can you stay right here?" He didn't touch her. He didn't move. He let her look at him, at the stranger with the bandaged arm and the worn jacket and the gentle, tired face. "Do you know what your mama's wearing?"
Luz sniffed and thought about it, with the ponderous concentration of the very small. "Blue," she whispered. "Blue... and a bag."
"A blue dress. Good. And a bag?"
A nod.
"That's great. That's really helpful, Luz."
Now, he thought. Now, quickly. He closed his eyes again, and reached, and the pain flared, and he pushed through it. The sense unrolled across the plaza like a net. Shapes, shapes, shapes. A man. A woman with two bags. An old lady with a cane. And then, at the far edge of his range, thirteen meters, fourteen, on the very brink of collapse: a woman moving fast against the crowd, shoving, turning, a knot of white-hot fear at her center, as bright as a struck match.
There.
He opened his eyes and lifted the girl into his arms, and she let him, and he carried her at a fast walk through the crowd, following the thread. The woman came out of the crowd forty seconds later, dress blue, bag flapping, face gray, screaming her daughter's name.
"LUZ!"
The girl shrieked. The woman dropped to her knees and gathered her up, and the two of them made a sound between a sob and a laugh, and Dev stood there with a hand pressed to his eye and blood dripping down his upper lip onto his shirt.
"I turned around for a second," the woman was saying, over and over, to no one. "One second. She was right there. I was paying for the—"
"It happens," Dev said. His voice came out thin. "It happens to everyone."
"You found her." The woman looked up at him, mascara streaked, eyes wild. "How did you find her?"
He opened his mouth. He had no answer, none that wouldn't sound insane.
"I heard her yelling," he said. "That's all."
The woman laughed, high and helpless, and then began to cry again, and pressed her forehead to Luz's hair. "God bless you," she whispered. "God bless you. God bless you."
He nodded, because he couldn't speak. He backed away with his hand cupped to his nose. Somewhere behind him, the mariachi music played on.
He found a bench at the edge of the plaza, under the tracks, and sat down heavily. The nosebleed had gotten bad. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tilted his head back and watched a train thunder overhead, rattling the girders, sending down a rain of paint chips and pigeon feathers.
VERIFICATION COMPLETE.
BENEFICIAL ACT: RECOVERY OF LOST CHILD.
HARM PREVENTED: MODERATE-HIGH.
COST TO CLAIMANT: PHYSICAL STRAIN (SIGNIFICANT), SUSTAINED USE OF ENDOWMENT.
MOTIVE: CLEAN.
MERIT AWARDED: +30.
MERIT: 126 / 100.
He read it with his eyes half shut.
"A hundred and twenty-six," he said, hoarsely. "That's a full ticket. And change."
THE LEDGER CONFIRMS THAT CONVERSION IS AVAILABLE.
"Yeah." He let his head fall against the back of the bench. "I noticed."
The headache throbbed behind his eye. It hurt in the deep, unhurried way of a bruise. But underneath it he felt something else, a slow warmth, a small, foolish sense of rightness that he'd never have admitted to anyone. He had drawn a power that couldn't hit anything, couldn't stop anything, couldn't save anyone by force. And he had used it to find a scared three-year-old in a crowd.
It isn't useless, he thought. It's just not what I asked for.
Then, at the very edge of his consciousness, as the pain began to ebb, he noticed something.
He had let the sense drift. It was resting now, slack and spent, spread out over the plaza like a hand on water. But it was still open, a faint, lazy circle, and at the very limit of its range something in the ground pressed back.
It was beneath him. Under the pavement, under the foundations, deep in the earth beneath the plaza's old cracked concrete. It wasn't a shape. It wasn't warm. It had no outline, no edge. It felt like a pressure, a slow, cold, patient hum, like a struck bell heard from the bottom of a well. And it knew him. He couldn't have said how. It was the way you know someone is looking at you from across a dark room.
He jerked upright. The sense snapped closed like a fist. The bench, the tracks, the pigeons: all of them snapped back into ordinary sight. The market went on around him, oblivious.
He sat there with his heart pounding and blood in his mouth.
LEDGER NOTE.
THE CLAIMANT HAS PERCEIVED SOMETHING OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF ORDINARY RANGE.
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE WHAT THE CLAIMANT HAS PERCEIVED.
"Was that a warning?" Dev said, in a whisper.
There was no answer. The gold line hung in his vision for a long moment, perfectly still, and then, without a word, it faded.
Above him, another train went thundering by.