Dr. Aris Thorne sat in the front pew at Leo’s funeral.
It was a small service. Only a handful of his people attended. His wife had died years ago. Her family never liked him. So it was not a surprise that they did not come to his son’s funeral.
Aris sat alone and stoic. He barely heard the pastor lead the service. Aris still had not shed a tear over Leo’s death. He hadn’t done any of his normal routines since Leo’s passing. His job was taken from him. The hospital discovered he had been using their assets to fund his secret research. He was close to finding a cure for the disease that took Leo. A week more was all that he needed, that he begged for.
But they denied him, fired him and killed the only chance he had of finding a cure. Essentially, killing his son.
Aris kept his head down and rubbed his hands together. He was the last one to leave the room when the service was over. His friends did their best to comfort him.
Aris placed Leo’s favorite toy onto the casket before it was lowered into the ground. He turned to take his seat when two men in plain clothes approached him.
“Are you Dr. Aris Thorne?” one of them asked.
“I am.”
“I’m sorry to do Dr. Thorne especially on a day like today,” the man reached for Aris.
“You are under arrest, sir,” the man looked at Thorne with understanding eyes. “The hospital filed charges against you.”
Aris nodded, holding out his hands to them.
The second officer lowered Aris’s arms. “No need Dr. Thorne. We didn’t want to do this publically, especially today.”
“We can wait until the funeral is over, sir.”
Aris shook his head. If they truly wanted to save me from embarrassment they would have waited until everyone had left, Aris thought.
“No need.”
Aris took one last look at the casket. He gathered his hat and trench coat from his seat. He walked away with the officers with only a single thought.
They didn’t stop me from saving Leo. They made sure I never could.
***
Aris spent the night in a small cell, staring at the walls and counting everything he had lost.
Spant spent the night on a rooftop, keeping watch over Lila Jean’s apartment.
Because she was off that night, she spent it alone. He watched her from a distance. She only pretended she wasn’t scared. He knew otherwise by the way she checked and doubled checked her windows throughout the night.
When he retreated from his perch for the night, he left a crawler stationed with a direct view of her apartment. She didn’t want his help even after he promised to help her with the mysterious people blackmailing her. He didn’t admit to her but he did feel responsible for her situation. The image of her in the museum, cornered and bleeding, wouldn’t leave him.
Now that he knew why she was stealing in the past. He felt worse. Some people steal for the rush of it. Others steal for personal gain. These were not her why’s. LJ stole to help her father, who was sick at the time and needed an experimental procedure to live. Her last heist was going to pay for it.
Spant couldn’t shake the memory of her face only hours earlier, the way her jaw tightened when she finally told him the truth. She wasn’t able to pay for the procedure but the doctor felt compassion for her and went ahead as planned. The procedure was a success.
“Dr. Aris Thorne,” she’d said, venom sharp in her eyes. “He visited me in jail the next day, sugah. Paid mah bail so that ah could go see daddy one last time before the operation. Ah gave him every dime ah had. It wasn’t enough but he did it anyway.”
She threw Spant off with these words on her tongue.
“Ah don’t want your help.” She pointed at the window. “Darlin’, Y’all have done enough to help me for a lifetime. Now get out of mah house.”
He took one last look as she peeked her head out of her bedroom window. “You may not want my help, LJ but you have it,” he whispered to himself.
Spant heard a commotion from the street below him. He looked over edge. A small boy had been pinned against a wall, with a knife to his neck, by a thug three times his size.
Spant clicked his tongue against a tooth. His gloved hand dug into the brick. Small debris rained down the side of the building.
The thug looked up and saw nothing but a shadow. He thought nothing of it.
“What’s a small child like you doing out at this time of night?” he asked the boy. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous out here?”
Spant landed behind the thug. The young man craned his neck looking up at Spant.
“That’s a good question. One that deserves an answer too,” Spant said.
The thug froze, and looked out of the corner of his eyes. His hand shook. The thug lowered his blade and raised his hands in surrender. He turned toward Spant.
“You’re that vigilante they’ve been talking about on the news.” The man folded the blade back into the handle and looked up at him, smiling. “There’s nothing here. See? I was just warning the kid about the dangers of being out late alone.”
Spant tilted his head. He looked at the boy, then back at the thug. He stepped closer.
“I see,” he said, eyes dropping to the man’s hand still wrapped around the knife. “And that was just a prop?”
The man swallowed. “S… sure. Yeah. Just a prop.”
Spant glanced down at the boy. “Go home.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, already running.
Spant waited until the child disappeared around the corner before turning back to the thug.
“I’ll be the student,” he said. “Show me what you were trying to teach him.”
The thug took a step back. “Nah, man. I’m just gonna go home. It’s late.”
Spant didn’t move. He watched the man’s shoulders tighten. The shift of his weight. The moment he decided.
The blade snapped open and the thug lunged.
Spant sidestepped. The knife cut nothing but air. He caught the man’s arm under his shoulder and drove a brutal series of elbows into the man’s face. Bone gave way. Again. Again. One final punch dropped him in a heap.
“Class dismissed.”
Spant turned and walked away.
***
Andre spread the contents over the coffee table neatly. If LJ had read these, she’d know, he thought.
One file stood out to him. It was labeled Hive Queen Andrea Brooks. Andrea Brooks he hadn’t said that name in years. His hand paused over the file.
Zayden walked into the room. Andre swept the files together and closed the folder fast. He positioned the folder out of reach without thinking. Although he allowed Zayden to be his eyes and ears when he was Spant, he rarely spoke of how he became Spant. He chose to shield Zayden from that part of his life.
“Saw you on the news earlier, dad,” he said, plopping himself next to Andre.
He smiled at him. “What do you mean?”
Zayden reached for the remote and turned on the television. “Someone filmed Spant beating up on a thug who tried to mug a small boy.”
Andre grunted. Zayden looked up at him and flipped through the channels. “The video got a lot of hits online. Some are calling you the ‘Urban Swarm.’”
“Urban Swarm.” The name sat wrong. “What are we watching?”
Zayden didn't expect Andre to allow him to stay up late. “I was thinking of watching a horror or thriller.”
“Find a thriller.” Andre said, walking into the kitchen. “I’ll make us some snacks. Let’s have a little fun and eat some junk food tonight.”
“Really?”
“Why not? Tonight’s Friday. You don’t have school in the morning and I am off tomorrow. I think we earned this.”
Zayden searched through the channels. When he found a movie, his gaze drifted to the folder and he reached for it.
“Don’t touch it.” Andre’s voice came from the kitchen.
***
LJ walked to the table, in a dark corner, balancing a tray of drinks on her left hand. This was supposed to be her night off but someone called out. The table she was waiting on was occupied with rowdy men. Her coworker, Michelle Lawler, asked her to take because of that very reason.
The girl was new and didn’t quite know how to handle the men. LJ was more than happy to take the table. She placed the drinks on the table.
“Will you gentlemen be needin’ somethin’ else? The house special is on sale tonight. Buy one get another plate half off.”
“No thanks.” One of the men said.
“Sure, darling,” said a man who looked like he hadn’t had a bath in a month as he slapped her butt and squeezed. “I would like a side of you on a side of you,” he laughed.
LJ’s eyes narrowed to a slit. The man laughed harder. A shadow slid down the wall, unnoticed by the men. It wrapped around the man’s arm just as he grabbed his drink. The glass smashed into the man’s face. Glass shattered and blood sprayed.
LJ hit him across the face with the tray. The floor reached up for him. Shadows secretly holding him down. She kicked him in the groin. His friends winced.
“Touch me again and ah will do more than slap ya with this tray!”
As she walked away, she stomped his hand.
“Lila!” a man’s voice from behind the bar yelled.
“He started it. Been touchin’ us all night long,” she pointed to a sign posted on the wall. Hands off the female staff. Touch them at your own risk.
Her boss nodded. “Pick up your friend. If I hear one more word from that table, you all will be thrown out immediately.”
LJ walked back to the bar where Michelle stood. Michelle smiled uncontrollably.
“Thank you Lila. I didn’t know what to do.”
She looked back at the table. “No need for thanks, sugah. It was mah pleasure.”
“You should be at home sleeping, not in here dealing with these men on your night off.”
“Bills don’t care about days off, sugah,” LJ said. “They come even while ah sleep.”
She thought about how Spant wanted her to go hide somewhere until he could figure out Swarn’s next move.
Ah don’t need him protecting me. Ah don’t need his help. Ah can protect mahself.
***
LJ’s shift ended at 2 am. She stepped out of the bar pulling the collar of her coat tight around her neck. There were a few people walking the streets. She wondered what kind of person would be out in this weather just strolling down a street.
A couple bumped into her. Their noses raised as they looked at her. She asked their forgiveness. She knew they were at fault but she apologized anyway.
“Next time watch where you are going,” the woman scoffed.
LJ stared at them as they walked away. She turned walking away. When they turned the corner, Lila Jean pulled the man’s wallet from her pocket. She looked at the ID.
“Trenton Prescott III,” she hissed. “He looked like a Trenton.” She took the cash from it and tossed the wallet on the street. Credit cards can be traced.
She started back towards her apartment building. The sound of footsteps seemed to follow her. She stopped and turned around. She clenched her fists, shadows dancing at her heels. There was nothing or no one there.
“That damn man got me jumpin' at every little noise.”
***
LJ stood on her balcony, coffee in hand. The sun had long since risen. She had overslept. The day chose to move without her.
She flipped a note with a phone number across the knuckles of her fingers. She remembered who had given it to her. Devon Gamble, a guard at Graymark Penitentiary, had slipped it to her the night before her release. He had a crush on her and she knew it.
She never intended to reach out to him. She found his number by accident. Going through her clothing for laundry, the forgotten piece of paper fell out of a pocket. LJ held the note to her lips for a moment before folding it.
Her eyes drifted to the floor where she saw the shadow of a crawler, Spant’s drone, pass along the floor. She looked up but it was gone.
She suddenly lost her appetite for the coffee. She set it on the balcony’s edge. If Spant was watching, he didn’t get to see her every move.
LJ walked through her living room, which now had no furniture, closing the curtains behind her. She entered her room, and opened her closet door before pausing.
Her fingers traced the wall for the light switch. She walked to the back of the closet where she saw a locked metal box. The box had Pharma’s logo engraved on the lid. She used a pick to unlock it. Inside were a pair of black gloves. She slid them over her wrists. She grinned widely when razor-sharp claws expelled and retracted at her command.
She didn’t tell Spant she stole more than the files. As far as she was concerned, this was need-to-know only and he didn’t need to know.
She felt the need to test them. She knew exactly where to go.
While LJ dressed in more suitable clothing, Andre sat at his computers tracking her every move. He noticed she had gone to some abandoned warehouse miles from her apartment. The crawler hovered outside the building.
He had one eye on LJ and the other on a second monitor. The face of her blackmailer was on it.
“Tha bastard didn’t know Ah had a camera in my scarf that night. Ah took this picture of him,” her words played back in his mind as he remembered her handing over the picture to Spant.
He had never seen the man. There was no record of him in the Carrow PD database. Andre settled into his chair. He knew it was going to take some serious digging to find out who the mysterious man was.
An alarm caught his attention. LJ’s heart rate spiked. Suddenly. Curious, he checked the crawler’s feed.
With a click, the drone hovered to a nearby window. LJ was in the middle of slashing through a steel column. Two slashes of her gloved claws, and the metal beam split in two.
He zoomed in on her hands and studied the display, impressed.
Intrigued, Andre leaned in. “You’ve been holding out on me, LJ. I knew you took more than just those files.”
Andre smiled. “What else are you keeping from me?”
Andre zoomed in on her hands and studied the image. He glanced back at L’s marker. Her heart rate was up. He felt this was a good time to test the newest addition to the crawlers’ abilities. He had equipped it with X-ray vision. With a click of a button, the crawler honed in on her. She was in the middle of tearing through a steel column. Two slashes of her clawed gloves, the metal beam split in two.
A sharp beep came from a monitor behind him. Andre spun around in his chair. His eyes flicked to a blinking dot elsewhere on the city grid. It moved in fits and starts, erratic, almost jittery. It wasn’t like the usual pedestrian traffic.
He leaned closer, zooming in, trying to make sense of it. Whoever—or whatever—was out there wasn’t normal.
The dot moved in an uneven jagged line for two blocks. It paused momentarily, the signal jittering in place.
Andre’s gaze narrowed. “People don’t stop like that in the middle of movement. Not without reason, at least,” he said.
It jolted forward across traffic. The blip vanished, then reappeared inside a city-run building. An alarm sounded across the monitor.
The dot stilled again. It moved once more. Andre watched as it skipped down blocks, covering ground in short bursts. Like before, it paused—never longer than thirty seconds—before another alarm sounded.
This time the alarm was triggered at a location law firm.
Andre leaned in closer. Although the blip didn’t linger long inside the law firm, it remained there longer than it had at the city building.
A pattern.
“This is a targeted attack.”
Andre turned his head back toward LJ’s monitor. She was on the move, heading away from the warehouse. By the route she followed, he knew she was going home.
Another alarm pulled his attention back to the monitor behind him.
The dot had already begun moving again—another short burst, another stop, another entry. Before the blip disappeared, Andre caught its final location.
Paradise Express. My workplace.
Andre froze.
“Employment agency. Employment lawyer. My workplace.”
He typed a command into the monitor. A blurry image of the blip appeared. He singled out a section and slowed the footage down. The image was still blurred. He ran an image enhancement program. The image became a little clearer.
His cellphone rang—
His boss was screaming on the other end.