“What are you doing up here?”
“Drinking,” Allison says. She gestures to the broken bottle.
“They have bars for that.”
“That’s where I got it from.”
“Look, young lady, I respect the work you do, but my daughter is trying to sleep.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to see her again.”
“Excuse me? How do you know my daughter?”
“From the park. She was going to fall off a slide—”
“You shouldn’t be here. If you don’t leave, I’m going to call the police.”
Allison’s never laid a hand on Sally before in anger. Now she grabs the front of Sally’s nightgown and shoves her back against the wall. “Goddamn it, she’s my daughter! I just wanted to see her.” Allison lets go of Sally to press her face into Sally’s shoulder.
She feels Sally pat her back gently. “It’s all right. We’ll get you some help—”
Allison looks up and then pulls off her mask. “Sally, it’s me. It’s Alan. Your husband.”
“What? That’s impossible—”
“Look into my eyes, goddamn it! Please?”
Sally’s eyes narrow but then widen as the realization hits. “Oh my God. Alan? What happened to you?”
Allison stumbles through the open window to drop onto Jenny’s bed. She picks up Jenny’s teddy bear to hold to her chest as she lies, “It was the explosion. I was in the lab when everything around me exploded. When I woke up, I was like this. I was a woman. And I was fast.”
Sally ducks through the window but presses herself against the wall to stare at her husband. “That can’t be true. They told me—”
“They lied. The government covered it all up. They wanted to protect my secret identity and all that stuff.”
“And you’re really a woman now? All the way?”
Allison nods. She grins slightly. “I have all the same parts you do.”
“My God. I…what are we supposed to do now? What am I supposed to tell Jenny?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus, Alan. You just show up here in the middle of the night, drinking and scaring me half to death and you expect me to find a way to explain it to Jenny?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m sorry.” Allison begins to sob again. She uses the teddy bear as a makeshift handkerchief. “I’ve missed you two so much.”
Sally finally sits on the bed next to her and puts an arm around her shoulders. “I’ve missed you too. So has Jenny.”
“But you don’t want me back, do you? Not like this.”
“Alan—”
“It’s Allison now.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Thanks.”
“Allison, I need some time to get everything straight, all right? It’s a lot to take in.”
“Can’t I stay tonight? I’ll be gone in the morning. Jenny won’t even see me.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Please? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Sally sighs and then pats Allison’s shoulder. “Fine. You go back to the bedroom and wait until I put Jenny to bed again. Don’t let her see you.”
“I won’t.”
She drops the teddy bear and then gets to her feet. In less than a second she’s safely in the bedroom. There’s no way Jenny could have seen her. Allison crouches down in the closet amongst some of her old clothes in case Jenny comes in.
She should probably run clear out of the apartment. That’s what Sally probably wants. But Allison wasn’t lying about not wanting to be alone. She’s spent over a month alone already, crying into her pillow most every night. She’s tired of running away; it’s time to get it all out into the open.
“Al—Allison?” Sally calls out softly.
Allison emerges from the closet. She stands in the middle of the room, not sure what to do now. Sally goes over to the dresser and takes something pink out. She tosses it to Allison, who unfolds it to see it’s a nightgown. “I think you’ll be more comfortable in that.”
“I suppose.”
She trudges into the bathroom; it would be too much of a step for her to get naked in front of Sally right now. The nightgown is a size too big on her, but she doesn’t mind. She recognizes it as the bulky flannel one Sally wears when her Aunt Flo comes to visit. Maybe it was the first one Sally grabbed or maybe she chose it because it’s the least revealing.
She steps out of the bathroom ten seconds later. “How do I look?”
“It’s fine,” Sally says.
They climb into the bed, but don’t touch. They haven’t been this awkward since their first night together back in college. That had been at Sally’s house, her parents in the next bedroom. The memory of this prompts her cheeks to warm. She tries to snuggle up against Sally, who backs away.
“Can’t you just hold me? Please? We don’t have to do anything.”
“All right.” Sally leans in until they touch. She runs a hand through Allison’s hair and smiles. “You’re pretty cute as a girl.”
“You really think so? I’m not too dowdy?”
Sally laughs at this. “You really are a woman now.” She leans over to kiss Allison’s cheek. Allison falls asleep in Sally’s arms for the first time in months. But in the morning Sally shakes her awake. “You’d better go. Jenny will be up soon.”
“Oh, right. Thanks for letting me stay over. Do you think we could do it again?”
“Let me think about it, all right?”
Allison forces herself to smile though her heart is breaking. She had hoped when Sally kissed her on the cheek that things would be different now, but they aren’t. As if reading her mind, Sally says, “I really enjoyed last night. It’s been so hard not having you here. It’s just…I don’t know how to explain this to Jenny. Until I can get that figured out, I don’t want to get attached. Do you understand?”
“Sure. Maybe we can talk about it later? I could meet you for lunch. We could have a picnic—”
“Allison, please, slow down. There’s a diner at 21st and Hayes. We can meet there.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll see you there.”
When Allison gets back to the lab two minutes later, she stares at her computer screen blankly. Things could have gone better, but they could have gone much worse too. At least now she has a chance to get her family back. That’s better than nothing.
Chapter 19
Copy editing is a tedious job. Starla takes off her glasses and then pinches the bridge of her nose. Kate is a very good reporter, but her spelling is atrocious. There are a dozen errors just in the first paragraph. She supposes some of this is because Kate is always in such a hurry.
The other reporters are even worse. Starla wonders if the previous copy editor had grumbled about how terrible Stan Shaw’s spelling was. She had tried to get it right, but there were always mistakes you couldn’t see; thus the necessity of a copy editor even in the days of computers with spell check.
If there’s one good thing about the job, it’s that her closet-sized office has a door. This comes in handy when her super hearing picks up the sound of a fire alarm. She locks the office door and then strips off her normal clothes to reveal her uniform. She dives out the window seconds later.
Her enhanced nose picks up the smoke from twenty blocks away. She follows it to the source, the building Ty Lecau had wanted bulldozed. That plan had been held up in the courts; apparently Lecau had decided not to wait for the courts to do their job.
She swoops down on the building. There aren’t any fire trucks on the scene yet. It wouldn’t surprise her if Lecau paid them off to get “caught in traffic” or have a “mechanical breakdown” on the way to the scene.
The blaze has already devoured half the building by the time she gets there. She listens with her enhanced hearing for anyone trapped. Her infrared vision won’t be much good in
a fire, nor will her flame breath. “Anyone in here?” she calls out.
There’s no answer until she gets to the fifth floor. Then she hears a little girl cry out. Starla crashes through a closet door to find three girls, the oldest maybe eight years old. She bends down to look them in the eye. “It’s all right. I’m going to get you out of here. Just grab on.”
The girls latch onto her. Starla hugs them tight and then stands up. She drops through a window, careful to control her rate of descent so the girls won’t fall. She leaves them on the sidewalk to head back into the building.
By the time she finishes, there’s about fifty of them on the sidewalk. The first girls Starla rescued immediately swarm the last woman she drops off. She feels someone take her hand. An old man grins at her. “Thank you so much, miss. Me and my family woulda burned up if you hadn’t shown up.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
Starla darts back into the building. The ceilings are starting to cave in now. She ignores the heat and flames to drop all the way to the basement. Even with the stench of burning garbage, she can smell the gasoline used to start the blaze. Someone on Lecau’s payroll.
Starla spins around fast enough to create a vortex that sucks in the flames. She flies slowly up through the building to pull the rest of the flames into her. Once she burrows through the roof, into the air, she stops spinning. The flames spew in all directions for a second before they dissipate.
The crowd cheers as she lands. A fire truck has finally pulled up to the building. Her infrared vision kicks in as she stomps up to the firemen. “You’re a little late,” she says. “It’s already put out. It started in the basement. Arson.”
“Why don’t you just stand back and let us have a look, doll,” one fireman says.
She pushes him back against his truck. “What took you so long? Those people almost died.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, toots—”
She grabs him by the front of his jacket. “Who paid you off? Was it Lecau?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Starla shakes her head to clear the infrared vision away. She puts one index finger to the man’s throat. With just a little push she could collapse his windpipe. It’s tempting, but she reminds herself to stay in control, not to lose it like she did with Ty Lecau. “You tell your boss that if he pulls a stunt like this again, I’m going to pay him a visit. Got it?”
“Sure thing,” he gets out through clenched teeth.
“Now go clean that mess up.”
The building’s residents—former residents—cheer her again as she flies away. She’s back in her office a couple of minutes later. She checks the time; she’s only been gone for twenty minutes.
She’s just got her glasses back on when there’s a tap on the door. Starla unlocks it in time for Kate to burst in. “Hey, you ready for lunch?”
“Sure.”
***
Starla picks at her salad while inside she seethes about the incident at the building. It’s not just that Ty Lecau paid someone to burn down his own building and then made sure the firefighters wouldn’t respond in time. More annoying is the way the firefighter talked to her. It was pretty much the same way Lecau had spoken to her, as if she were a child or some kind of servant—
Her bowl cracks as she stabs the fork right through it. Kate looks up from her phone and frowns. “Bad day?”
“Just clumsy,” Starla says, forcing a smile to her face.
“What’s the matter? Did someone use a comma instead of a semicolon?”
“Now that you mention it—”
They laugh, but Starla is still uneasy. She looks down at her shattered bowl. “Do you ever get tired of being a woman? You ever think maybe things would be easier if you were a man?”
“What’s wrong, kid? Has someone been giving you a hard time?”
“No, everyone at the Star has been wonderful. I guess I’m still thinking about Ty Lecau. There are so many men out there like him, men who think we don’t matter because we’re women.”
“There are a lot of dirtbags out there, that’s for sure.” Kate sips her Diet Coke and then smiles. “But I think a sex change is a little extreme.”
“I suppose so. I’m just saying, if you could do it instantly, just push a button and do it, would you?”
“God, no.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier? Wouldn’t people take you more seriously then?”
“Trust me, I’ve never been interested in doing it the easy way. And the people who would take me more seriously if I had a penis are the type not worth impressing.” An electric charge runs through Starla as Kate takes her hand. “Starla, you are a smart, beautiful woman. Don’t ever let these shitheads make you think differently.”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
“Of course you are. If I were a man, I’d be all over you.”
“Really?”
“Hell yes.” She squeezes Starla’s hand. “There’s no shame in being beautiful, especially when you have the brain to go with it. I should know.”
Starla’s face turns warm. She and Kate never talked like this before. When she’d been Stan Shaw, they had kidded around, but it had always been like an older sister-little brother relationship. She’d never felt comfortable enough to talk about her feelings or insecurities before.
“Thanks. I feel better now.”
“Hey, how about after work I take you out shopping? Buy you the most impractical shoes we can find. That’ll make you feel better.”
“That sounds fun.”
Kate checks her watch. “I’ll see you at five. I’ve got a couple of leads to follow up on this apartment fire.”
“Oh, sure,” Starla says. Her face turns warm again when Kate gives her a kiss on each cheek like the Europeans do. Then with a little wave, she’s gone.
***
Starla is still in the office at six o’clock. She hasn’t seen Kate since lunch. It’s not unusual for Kate to get wrapped up in a story, but she should have at least called by now to say she was running late.
Starla finds Billy at the desk he occupies when working on an assignment for the paper. He looks up and smiles at her. “Something I can do for you, Miss Marsh?”
“I’m just wondering if you’ve seen Kate? She promised to meet me at five and she hasn’t called.”
“I haven’t seen her around. You think she’s in trouble?”
The thought hadn’t consciously occurred to her until that moment. “It’s possible. She said she was following up some leads on that apartment fire.”
“Gosh, you think we should look for her?”
“Why don’t you ask around to see if she’s talked to anyone here recently? I’ll go check by her apartment in case she forgot.”
“Sure thing, Miss Marsh.”
Billy jumps up to do her bidding. He’s always been enthusiastic, but now she wonders if there’s something more to it. The thought of her and Billy together makes her cringe. He’s a nice guy, but they’ve been such good friends over the years that it would be really weird to be anything more than that.
She forces these thoughts from her mind. She heads up to the roof to change out of her clothes again. As Apex Girl she flies off the roof to head for Kate’s apartment.
With her infrared vision she scans the apartment. There’s no one inside. She lands on the balcony and wrenches the door open. From the look of the place, Kate hasn’t been around all day. She pushes the button on the answering machine. There’s a message from her mother and a couple telemarketers. No death threats or anything like that.
With her fists clenched, Starla jumps off the balcony. She hurtles across the city to TyCorp. From prior experience she knows where his office is. According to her IR vision, there’s only one person inside. She hopes it’s him and not a cleaning person or whoever he coerced into being his new secretary.
She smashes through the window. With one hand she snatches him from the chair and then presses him to the ceiling. “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Kate King.”
“Who?”
“Reporter for the Star. She was checking into that little pyrotechnic display you put on earlier.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Don’t lie to me!” She slams him through the ceiling, into an air duct. When she pulls him back, he’s covered in dust and insulation. “What did you do, send some of your hired thugs after her?”
“You’ve got the wrong guy—”
“I said don’t lie to me!” This time she hurls him to the floor. He screams as he tries to get up. He’s probably got a broken leg now. She lands in front of him. “This is your last chance, Lecau. What did you have done with her?”
“She’s in a warehouse. Down by the docks. That’s all I know.”
Starla glares at him and says, “I’d suggest you not be here when I get back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says with a whimper.
Starla takes off through the broken window for the docks. She isn’t sure how she’ll find Kate among so many warehouses. She’ll have to rely on her senses. Or tear the buildings apart one-by-one until she finds something.
This thought gives her pause in mid-flight. She needs to calm down. She can’t help Kate this way. She has to relax and be rational, not emotional. It’s hard when she has all these new hormones and new feelings welling up.
She takes a deep breath and then eases down over the docks. She flies low enough that her super hearing should be able to pick up anyone talking—or firing a weapon. Her IR vision picks up a few signatures, but from their voices they’re ordinary workers.
After what seems like an eternity she comes to a warehouse populated by three signatures. Two are standing while the third is sitting. From the way the third one is sitting, it must be someone tied to a chair. Kate!
She hears a man’s voice say, “You shouldn’t have stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong.”
“I bet your boyfriend here says that a lot, doesn’t he?”
There’s a sharp crack, like someone being slapped. Starla’s eyes narrow. She’s not going to bother with subtlety now. She crashes through the roof of the warehouse at top speed. Two men scatter as she comes to a stop in front of Kate King.
“Are you all right?”
“Just fine,” Kate says.
“Don’t worry about these two. I’ll handle them.”