--ovw--III--ovw--

  "Okay, so have you found the guy?"

  "Not yet." Belinda Klein was working investigations on the 5th floor of the Webwork, where I spent my working hours if I wasn't in the US, or wasn't with Malcolm or Kaylee.

  Malcolm didn't need to work anymore now that I had money coming in, but he insisted, and I wasn't going to take that away from him. Kaylee didn't need to work, of course- her dads had the agency, which, as it turns out, was the Union of Stars' Overwoods branch.

  It took Kaylee's family and James about a year to determine if I was, and I quote, "what the U.S. needs" to help carry out certain operations. They all knew I was never going to participate in any experiments or conducting them, so they assigned me to help work criminal investigations. At least for now.

  I wasn't even very useful in my opinion. They just needed me for random fancy things where a person with no superpowers might have trouble. Areas where someone needed to get in somewhere quick, and get out quick; situations where a person physically had to obtain evidence or information fast and without jeopardizing the entire investigation. Fun happy stuff.

  I felt like a charity case. Maybe I did have superpowers, but personally I felt as though I was no one special. Just someone lucky enough that people wanted to help me. These other people, working in the US, were either rich, born in the US, had a ton of master's degrees, or all three.

  I was none of the above, and standing there thinking about it all, I could feel my anxiety and PTSD and insecurities mixing all together at once. I wonder what these people saw in me.

  "You know where the suspect was; you know both the hotel and the room he was in, but still don't have the suspect's name?" I asked Belinda. Her hair was the same dark black as mine, but dyed pink. I didn't even know if that was allowed in the agency. You could see the roots growing in; some of them were gray and not black. "It's been a week since the murder."

  "These answers don't come in a day, or a week, or sometimes even a month, agent Midnight."

  That's what they see in me, I suppose. Christopher Midnight, the name they gave to the boy who had been close to death on more than a few occasions, the boy who survived pain, hunger, and violence; the one who survived Experiment Nightingale.

  I mean, Kaylee survived Experiment Nightingale, too. But her skills were very different from mine.

  "Do I go home?" I said.

  Over the last couple of months, Klein instructed me to simply “go home,” mid-warrant-writing. I didn’t question it. Blue light, white light, and orange light emanated from my computer screen while I uploaded my newer crime-ring files onto it.

  Facial composites, drafts, eliminated targets, checklists.

  Leaders of organized abuse rings I hadn’t taken out yet. Spreadsheets with blank spaces in them if I hadn’t identified the names; the addresses; the phone numbers and locations.

  Because despite officially working in the U.S., I was still the same “vigilante” I was at fifteen.

  When I wasn’t trapped in an abuse house.

  I didn’t even know I was a vigilante until James told me.

  “Target takedowns last week?” Belinda Klein asked, which was clearly not an answer to my question. I didn’t mind; I did that to her too. Responded to her questions with questions.

  She wanted to know how many I’d accomplished the week before, and I was already having a moment of PTSD, so it took me longer than normal to count even though I could’ve just opened the file.

  Without touching the enormous computer screen or the keyboard or the wireless titanium optical mouse, I answered her question.

  “Five.”

  It had been almost a year since I did that first favor for James, and I was happy with the name they gave me, mostly because I never even knew what my real name really was... or if I even had one. Danny was just what I called myself. To me, it was nice- to feel that I belonged somewhere, belonged to any people or even with any people, anywhere at all as long as it was not the Lowdown; people who knew me and trusted me and had a name for me; people who knew where I was needed.

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  Belinda made a strange face when she looked at me. She squinted her one-shade-of-black eyes.

  “Week before that?”

  “Nine. Nine and a half if you count the lady I disarmed and incapacitated before the entire building went down on her.”

  “She lived. And she injured you back, so I don’t count that.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill her.”

  “Which means you did not follow my orders,” she said.

  “I don’t exactly take orders from you.”

  She laughed- an almost crazed laugh; a mocking laugh. It lasted for five seconds.

  Which was four seconds too long.

  “If your boss can’t get his… stimulant habits under control,” she said, practically hissing at me while her snake tattoos- green and dark green and even darker green- all glared at me with their deep red eyes, “I likely will be.”

  Frankly, at the time, that wasn’t much of a threat to me. James was already terribly difficult to work for.

  I stared blankly at Belinda before a look of comicality instead took over my facial expression.

  “Connor is also gunning for that position,” I said.

  She laughed, again.

  “Like he has any chance against me,” she replied.

  For some reason, I thought of Malcolm. I thought of Kaylee.

  I didn’t speak again because it was extremely incapacitating to speak to anyone as my PTSD-flashback-intensity-level spiked from an “innocuous” 3.5 to a skyrocketing 21.9 out of ten.

  I covered my face in moth my hands and fought off tears.

  I am enough. Maybe I don't feel it right now, believe it right now. But one day I will.

  "Paperwork," Belinda said. She means the ones I'm qualified to work even without earthshattering master's degrees. Apparently I can write. Apparently my grammar is sort of okay.

  I still occasionally missed words while writing, because PTSD; because mid-flashback moments.

  I wiped my eyes. I coughed to clear my throat and then I looked at the ceiling. And then I went back to the faces and files on the computer screen, as I replied, very quietly, to Belinda Klein.

  "And then?" I said.

  "Dip the gloves in the sterilizers,” she replied. “Then you can go."

  I physically clapped my hands out of happiness, like a child.

  Because the child inside my heart and inside my soul has survived; I did a job greater than most people do, of keeping him still alive inside of me. Alive, passionate. Fighting. Like the fighter I always have been; without ever even meaning to be.

  Belinda looked at me.

  “And don’t bother joining your lab friends at the fucking sixteenth floor- “

  “Nineteenth.”

  “Yeah, whatever, don’t bother because I made sure their lunch hour does not match yours.”

  I stopped clapping.

  "Okay," I said. I used to always feel I didn't know who I was, or what I was. I'm lucky Malcolm mitigated that early. Kaylee came along, and her family, and James and the agency. I wasn't lost anymore, or at least I wasn't as lost as I used to be. I looked back at Belinda, before sitting down. "Belle."

  "Yes?"

  "You said our suspect had a nickname?"

  "It's only a hunch, a theory."

  "An assumption, yes. What was the nickname?"

  "The Manila Maniac."

  I physically cringed. "Really?"

  "Yes." Belinda looked at me and smiled. "Pathetic name, isn't it?"

  "Where is it from?"

  "The location of this murder and other unsolved murders are all in an area called the Lowdown; thousands of years ago it was known as Manila."

  "I know." I paused. Then I sat down, and ran my fingers along the sheet of paper in front of me. "I used to live there." I had to take a moment to think, to remember things I can't erase or push aside. To accept them, and carry on best I could. Essentially I was frozen in the past for just a moment; this was something Belinda Klein was now accustomed to, having worked on the same team. She could tell from my eyes. I cleared my throat. "What makes us assume this was the Manila Maniac?"

  "Victim was female, about fourteen years old-"

  "Decapitated?"

  "Yes, Midnight, decapitated." She gave me a look. "And as I'm sure you've heard, this isn't the first dead body of a very young person found in that area, with its head cut off."

  "Weren't there three others?"

  "Sixteen others. Thirteen just weren't as popular, weren't made as public."

  "And they're not all women."

  "Correct. In fact, eleven of the seventeen were male."

  "Signs of abuse?"

  "Rape."

  I put my hands together in front of me. Hadn't I dealt with people like this before? Before I understood anything? Was I fortunate to have walked out of the situation I was in with two working legs and a beating heart?

  "The address," I said. "Give me the address."

  Belinda tied her pink hair into a knot.

  "Belle, the address, please."

  "You don't want to do this." Her attention was on her computer screen. "And you're eighteen."

  "What does my age have to do with this?"

  "Chris," she said. "You're young. You're traumatized. And it's only been several years since you left a bad situation."

  "Don't talk to me like that."

  She took a ballpoint pen and a sticky note, scribbled on it, and slammed it onto my desk with her right hand. "All right, your choice," she said. Unfinished papers flew onto the floor. The tattooed snakes on her forearm stared at me with red eyes. Ladders and snakes, roses and thorns. All in color.

  She stalked back to her computer, and I could've sworn the entire planet could hear her keyboard when she started typing on it again.

  I took the sticky note.

  #67 DIRTWATER AVENUE LOWDOWN 1216.

  There was an edge to her voice now. "Tell James I told you not to, when you go crying to him."

  "I'll do that," I said. "Thanks, Belinda."

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  --The Overwoods - 124,303 words - 630 pages - 155h--