Page 72 of Antihero

“X. You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Just get it done.”

“X. I will.”

A pause.

“X?”

A longer pause.

“X?”

“Thank you, J.”

Click.

“Can you … Will you help me?”

Candy glanced over from her post at the living-room window. In the wake of Anca’s attack, her view of humanity had dimmed ever further. She’d been surveilling the street, hoping for somebody to do something terrible in clear view so she’d have a reason to beat them senseless.

Anca stood in the slim crack of the bathroom door, towel wrapped tightly around her midsection, steam rolling over her shoulders. An awkward, self-conscious slump, wisp of hair curled across her throat, Venus on that big-ass shell.

Candy said, “Yes.”

She walked over. Anca hesitated before stepping back and allowing the door gap to widen. The bathroom was small, close quarters, choked with steam.

Candy cleared her throat. “What do you need?”

Anca’s chin dipped, eyes lowered. She turned timidly and let the towel slide a few inches off her shoulder blade, showing the obscene drawing. The skin around it had been scrubbed red, the black marker faded but still clearly visible.

Candy wondered at the amount of work it had taken Anca to clear the matching filth from her cheek. In the mirror, Candy saw Anca’s features contort briefly into a sob. She fought her face back into control and Candy pretended not to have noticed.

Anca reached for a bottle on the lip of the sink beside a nearly depleted bag of cotton balls. She handed the rubbing alcohol to Candy. “I can’t reach it well enough.”

Candy set the bottle back down. “Olive oil works, too,” she said. “Gentler on the skin.”

“It’ll take longer.”

“It’s okay,” Candy said. “I have time.”

Anca’s cheeks were flushed from the heat of the shower or maybe from something else. Her eyes brimmed.

She nodded with gratitude.

It was either day or night, Devine decided, before realizing that was not exactly a Kantian bit of reasoning. He lay in Egyptian-cotton sheets with a four-figure thread count, too tired to sleep, fragmented notions piercing his spinning mind, stuck through the white matter like shards. He did not feel at home inside himself. And there was nowhere else to go.

Even so, he could not give up. A verse from Pirkei Avot fell like rainwater through the hollowness at his core: It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it. God, he loved the channelers of the first Book, those who’d leapt to touch the numinous unknown and pair it with the light inside every human.

Rolling onto his side, he used the meat of his biceps as a pillow, curling fetally. Shade-muted light fell in melon slices from the radius windows to lie across him. A moment of peace.

Then there came a tapping of footsteps. Two sets.

Rawlings cleared his throat. “Sorry to bother you, sir.”