72.
Jamie
The attendance clerk at Curtis High couldn’t hide her panic, which bothered Jamie, but not nearly as much as not getting an answer to her question. “Where’s Kyra Barton?” she asked again.
“I … I … I …” the poor woman said, hands shaking as she punched at the keys. Jamie had heard the school go into lockdown before she’d even gotten five steps into the office. That didn’t matter to her; she had to find Kyra and get her out, get her some place safe, and frankly, a full-school lockdown was about as safe as she could manage without having her daughter in her arms and carrying her off. “… She didn’t show up this morning,” the attendance clerk finished, pointing at the screen and smearing finger oil over it. “See?”
Jamie stared at the monitor wordlessly. There was her daughter’s name, and full attendance record, in a grid-like chart. For today, sure enough, there was a mark for absence. “This is …” Jamie said, staring at it, willing it to change. “She couldn’t have … couldn’t have …” She turned and stalked out of the office, making it to the door just as she heard the slamming of other doors behind her.
“Did she skip school today?” Jamie wondered aloud. She’d been gone before Kyra normally woke up, and her door had been closed. She turned toward the direction of their house and launched herself into the air, soaring over the Staten Island neighborhoods.
If she’d done this last night, she would have been home in minutes, not an hour. She could have found her foreclosure notice without the humiliation of walking into a convenience store and losing both her credit card and ATM card. She could have had her saltine cracker dinner early instead of starving as she walked holes in her shoes getting home.
None of that mattered now, though. Jamie focused, rolling above the streets with channels walking her over the tops of houses and buildings like great stilted legs. She could see her own home in the distance, flashing lights surrounding it. The FBI would already be there, then. Maybe they’d have Kyra, and then she wouldn’t have to worry—
“Whoa!” came a voice behind her, and Sienna Nealon came to a stop beside her, breathless, her shirt fluttering in the wind. “I came as soon as I heard.”
“Did you?” Jamie asked, not ceasing her forward momentum. She had to get to the house, to Kyra. Once Kyra was safe, and she was sure of it, then she could surrender to the authorities, and not a moment before. Kyra would need somewhere to go, somewhere away from Staten Island while this whole mess played out. “Why?” she asked, not really caring what answer Sienna gave.
“Because you’re innocent, duh,” Sienna said, keeping pace with her easily, hovering along like she was walking beside Jamie.
“Nobody else seems to think so,” Jamie said tightly, “and it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“I think it matters at least a little,” Sienna said, nodding at the house ahead. “You know the FBI is waiting there to arrest you, right?”
“My daughter is there,” Jamie said. “I need to make sure she’s okay before I can turn myself in. She has to be home. She—” Her voice cracked. “She just—she has to be.”
“I think Nadine Griffin is behind this,” Sienna said. “Because you made her look bad in front of the whole world with the—”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Jamie said, almost ignoring her.
“No, I’m serious,” Sienna said. “That lady is bad news. I think she orchestrated that whole attack yesterday so she could wipe the evidence for her prosecution, and now she’s added you to the hit list as a sort of collateral damage—”
Jamie stopped in mid-air, her gravity channels ceasing all motion and yanking her to a halt. “That …” She blinked, staring across the blue sky and the Staten Island greenery broken by the roofs of houses. “Is that why my finances got wrecked yesterday?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Someone foreclosed on my house, ruined a commercial loan that totally trashed my business, repo’d my car, cancelled my credit cards, and overdrew my bank accounts,” Jamie said, it all coming out in a rush. “I just thought it was an error, or an accidental part of this cyber-attack.”
Sienna grimaced. “Yeah … that probably wasn’t an error, no.”
Jamie stared at her. “This is your fault,” she said quietly. “None of this ever happened before I met you.”
“Hey,” Sienna said, looking a little offended, “I wasn’t the one who called Nadine Griffin a thieving bitch in the middle of a crowd on Wall Street.”
Jamie blushed hard. “I—I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t.”
“Close enough,” Sienna said. “Look, I am with you in this, okay? I want to help.”
Jamie let the air out. “I don’t know that you can. I just need to make sure Kyra’s safe, and then I’ll turn myself in and—”
She didn’t even get to finish her sentence. Sienna shouted, but it was too late, and made no sense. “Watch out! It’s FRIDAY!”
“It’s not Friday, it’s Thurs—” Jamie said before she caught a glimpse of a man in a black mask riding a pillar of water, streaking up into the sky a second before he slammed into her. She felt bones break in her side, screaming pain run through her. He wrapped a thick arm around her neck and pulled her, yanking her sideways.
Her gravity channels failed, her concentration gone as the big man pulled her down, choking her, and she fell, dragged back down to earth not by the gravity at her command but by the hands of her enemies.