The Rift (6 page)

“
Well, maybe if we had their
wardrobe budget…”

She grinned. He punched the down button to
summon the elevator. Despite his words, Pieter didn’t wear his
usual easy, carefree look. He seemed tense, like he couldn’t quite
ditch the memories from the night before.

They walked a few blocks to a tiny shop with a
sign overhead that read
Santa Maria Steaks
. A glass window
faced the street. Somehow, the entire guts of Carlos’s restaurant
fit in one tiny room behind that window. A few tables on a plaza
out front provided the only seating.

“
Give me tri-tip!” Pieter bellowed
into the ordering window.

A young blonde girl smiled back. “Sandwich or
combo plate?”

A voice came from the kitchen. “Hey, Vero,
Pieter!”

“
Carlos,” Pieter said.

Vero’s brother-in-law, wearing an apron stained
black with years of barbeque residue, walked up to the
window.

“
Isn’t it, like, a 10 percent
discount for friends and family?” Pieter asked.

“
Nah, for you guys?
Free.”

As though Pieter didn’t know.

“
Vero, you want anything?” Carlos
asked.

“
Maybe just a little
salad.”

“
And give me a Cactus Cooler,”
Pieter said.

“
A what?” Carlos asked.

“
Only the best soda of all time. I
swear, you get Cactus Cooler on tap, you’ll double your business!
It’s so hard to find a good orange soda around here.”

Vero and Pieter sat in the shade at a mesh
metal table. The blonde girl brought a tray out a little later, and
Pieter dug into his beefy sandwich. Vero’s side salad was anything
but. Diced beef and blue cheese covered the top. It had to have a
million calories.

She exhaled and leaned back in her seat, glad
to have Pieter to calm her down. It felt so good to do something
simple like watching her boyfriend gorge himself on a tri-tip
sandwich to the sound of passing traffic. Even the bearded man
digging through the trash just felt… simple. Normal.

“
Well, sorry to put you through all
that last night,” Pieter said.

“
Hey, you didn’t know what’d happen
in that field.”

“
No, I mean the dinner.”

“
Oh,” she laughed. “I kinda
predicted it. Just… no more double dates for at least six months,
okay?”

He nodded. “Sure. There just… used to be a lot
more to Neil than games and anime.”

Across the street, two men plummeted from a
roof to the sidewalk. Pieter, facing away from them, didn’t notice.
A few people nearby stepped back in shock, but the men landed on
their feet. And they had weapons: a mace and a sword.

Impossible, impossible, impossible. That was
Jed and Dek. Jed’s hand clutched the cut Vero had given him the
night before. Dek held… was that a JanSport backpack? It looked
new. The two soldiers glanced around.

Vero leaned in and whispered to Pieter,
“Pieter, Pieter, they’re here.”

“
Who?’” he asked.

“
Quiet,” she whispered, beginning
to tremble. “The guys from last night. Across the street. What are
they doing here?”

Pieter flicked his head around to look then
turned back to Vero. He stayed quiet, but if she knew Pieter, he’d
come up with something.

She shoved her head onto the mesh table, a
gross, sticky thing that probably had drunk college student barf
dried all over it. What were those two guys doing here?

“
Don’t panic, stay hidden,” Pieter
said in a low voice. He placed a hand on her elbow.

Jed and Dek looked in their direction, a number
of cars passing on the one-way street between.

“
I have my armband in my purse,”
Vero said. “If I slip it on, we could maybe get on the roofs,
and…”

Pieter shook his head and kept his voice low.
“You don’t think they’d spot that? What are they doing?”

“
Jed’s staring straight at us. He’s
pointing this way.”

Pieter clenched his hands into fists. “He saw
us in the dark. He doesn’t recognize us. I’d already have a sword
in my back if he did. Stay down.”

Jed and Dek leaped across the street. Vero
jolted; Pieter pushed down on her elbow and ducked his head next to
hers. “Quiet,” he whispered. “We can’t outrun them while they’re
using those things.”

The two soldiers landed on the sidewalk nearby.
Vero’s breath came in gasps. Her hand stretched to her
purse.

“
Chill,” Pieter said, his voice
barely above a whisper.

She moved her head just enough to glance up
with one eye. They weren’t looking at her and Pieter. They walked
quickly toward Carlos’s shop, just a few feet from Vero, then
passed behind her, out of her vision.

“
Let’s go,” Pieter whispered.
“Slow.”

The stickiness from the table smacked as Vero
pulled her skin away. She lifted her purse off the ground; the
strap vibrated with the shaking of her hand. Pieter took her arm,
and they walked—so slow she wanted to scream—up the
street.

From behind them, Jed shouted, “Give me your
dollars! All of them!”

She risked a glance backward before passing
around the corner of a brick building. Jed stood at the window to
Carlos’s shop, sword pointing at the glass. Once out of sight, Vero
stopped to listen.

“
That a sword?” Carlos asked. “Why
you have a sword?”

The sound of shattering glass echoed around the
courtyard. The cashier girl screamed.

“
Put your dollars in this bag,” Jed
shouted.

“
We need to get out of here,”
Pieter said.

“
No,” Vero said. “We’re just going
to walk away?”

He tugged Vero’s arm. “Nothing we can do. Even
if we had our weapons, I don’t think we could take them, not just
the two of us.”

They walked at a brisk pace up the street.
Vero’s chest heaved up and down; a tear escaped down her face. She
wasn’t all that close to her brother-in-law, but he’d made her
sister really happy and had been amazing to their whole family. He
and Emilia having the baby was what made everyone move to SLO. He’d
even found their rental, such as it was. He was a good, good man.
She didn’t want baby Maria to grow up without a daddy.

Sirens blared somewhere in the distance. The
police wouldn’t get Jed, not while he could jump. And even if they
caught up to him, they might regret it.

Pieter pulled Vero into a little clothing
store. Pretty dresses hung from racks around the room. It was the
kind of place her classmates could afford to shop at.

“
They won’t see us in here,” he
said.

Just ignore it, eh? Pretend nothing was
happening? Suddenly, Vero wanted rather to hurt those who’d just
hurt her family. Though here, surrounded by cute tops and some
expensive accessories, a more sensible side warned that she was
better off hiding.

“
Then I said, ‘Usually, a gun’s
better for a holdup than a sword,’” Carlos said in Spanish. He
laughed. Vero didn’t remember him spouting that line, but she kept
quiet.

The five Mendoza women surrounded Carlos in his
living room. Emilia coddled baby Maria. The TV played, and Vero sat
in a recliner on the outer edge, texting her friend
Kristin.

Carlos’s laugh changed to a frown. “Then he
busted in the glass. Wish I’d been standing farther back, might not
have these.” He held up arms covered in white bandages.

“
He get the money?” Vero’s mom
asked.

“
Yeah. Julie opened the register.
Four hundred dollars! I told the girls to drop cash to the safe
more often. We gotta have a talk about that.”

Vero was responsible for this, somehow. If she
hadn’t been there that night… no, Jed would have come through
either way. But if she hadn’t taken the weapons from James… no,
that didn’t make a difference either. Regardless, she didn’t want
to be part of this conversation.

Vero’s mom poked her daughter in the arm. “And
you just ran away?”

Vero mumbled some kind of affirmative and
slouched lower in the chair.

“
Quiet, it’s almost on,” Emilia
said.

A large, three-dimensional eight rotated on the
screen then transitioned to a man standing in front of Carlos’s
shop, the front window shattered. A voiceover spoke in English. “A
quiet Sunday afternoon in downtown SLO turned dangerous when two
robbers with swords held up five separate downtown businesses then
vanished.”

Grainy security footage showed Dek throwing a
young woman to the ground in a souvenir store.

“
I’m here with Carlos Fontana,
owner of Santa Maria Steakhouse,” said the reporter.

Carlos showed up on screen identified by the
text
local restaurant owner
.

“
Come on, it’s Santa Maria Steaks,”
Carlos said to Vero and the others. “They got it wrong.”

“
Quiet,” his wife said.

The Carlos on screen said in English, “Yeah, I
was barbequing some tri-tip when they showed up. I was pretty
nervous.”

The screen cut to another restaurant owner, who
claimed that the robbers somehow got onto the rooftops and ran
away. Someone also reported them stealing a backpack, the one Vero
had spotted them with.

“
The two culprits are still on the
loose,” the reporter said. “Due to their weapons, police suspect
they may also be responsible for the murder of an unidentified
homeless man off Orcutt Street last night.” The TV displayed
sketches that looked a little like Jed and Dek. “Suspects are armed
and highly dangerous. Back to you in the studio.”

Carlos snatched the remote off his table and
muted the TV.

“
That’s it? They interview me for
fifteen minutes, and that’s all? I had some good jokes in
there.”

“
Honey, your jokes never work in
English,” Emilia said.

“
Or Spanish,” Bella added. The
other sisters laughed.

“
Five stores in one afternoon,”
Carlos said. “I don’t get how they outran the cops. The tall guy
even looked hurt.”

“
And why swords?” Vero’s mom
asked.

As her family jabbered back and forth, Vero
slipped out onto the second-floor apartment balcony with her purse
and sweater. She looked out over a quiet street.

Better that her family didn’t know about the
field. Carlos might like all that attention from Vero’s family; he
hadn’t lived with it his whole life. Right now, she needed privacy
and quiet, not loud sisters.

Okay, so Jed was out there, somewhere, beating
people up and stealing money. He probably just needed a place to
stay and food to eat until more people from Ruach arrived. The only
other thing he had on his mind was… well, to do what he’d promised:
kill Vero and the others—if he could even recognize them after
seeing them in the dark. If today were any indication, he might
never find them.

She pulled out her well-worn phone and flipped
it open. “Can I wake up now?” she texted Pieter.

Amazing that the night after getting hit with
an axe, Jed was out committing armed robbery. That was the power of
the soul armors. Was there a limit, or could he just use it all day
like that?

Vero looked at the armband at the bottom of her
purse as she waited for Pieter’s response. It looked like a simple
piece of jewelry, but it could do amazing things. The night before,
aside from the fight, using the soul armor had felt incredible. She
looked around, confirmed the balcony was empty, then slid the band
under her sweater.

Her phone bleeped with Pieter’s response.
“Nope, nightmare continues. You okay?”

“
Family kidnapped me to come watch
Carlos recover at his place.”

“
He hurt bad?”

“
Santa Maria Steaks got it worse.
What do we do?”

“
Hide.”

A cool fall breeze blew by. “We’re armed, you
know.”

As she waited for Pieter’s reply, she focused
on the band. The thing felt warm, despite the cool air. Warmer than
it should. Like a bolt of lightning, something inside her ignited.
Diotein roared to life.

From inside, her mom called, “Vero, what you
doing out there?”

She watched a car drive past. The speed of it
felt… funny. Time slowed. No, that wasn’t quite right. Time moved
the same, but she could take in and process more details. At the
same time, she felt empty, hollow. Somewhere out there—a couple
miles away under a blanket in her room—waited this thing’s other
half. The armor felt almost… mournful, and the blaze inside her
seemed weaker than the night before. She could feel the rough
direction and distance to her axe.

Her phone vibrated. “So, planning to fight a
war?”

“
No, but I don’t think we can
ignore Jed. He promised to kill us.”