Page 51 of Antihero

“Rubbing alcohol,” Evan said.

She smelled sharply clean, antibacterial soap and tea-tree shampoo. “You have experience with this?”

“Camo paint,” Evan told her. “Sniper black.”

“I see,” she said.

She was short, around five foot three. Slender wrists poked from the cuffed-back sleeves of her sweater, the pisiform bone at the outer edge of her wrist no bigger than a pea.

Despite his average size, Evan felt large and rough before her.

“My seizure plan, I am … I am naked without it. I had an extra in my backpack but it is lost. The backups are in my office at the church.” A flash of irises, the color of clear sky, met him. She started to talk, stopped, bit her lower lip.

“I can stay with you,” Evan said. “If you’d like.”

She nodded.

“Would you like me to call a car?”

Her lips firmed. She blinked several times rapidly, getting up her nerve. “The subway,” she said. “I will take the subway.”

At first Evan didn’t understand.

And then he did.

Wind whipped Anca’s hair. She’d halted about twenty feet from the mouth of the subway entrance. Hot air rushed upward across their cheeks, smelling of grease, peanuts, industrial heat.

“I don’t think … I’m not sure I can.”

Evan said, “Okay.”

He didn’t move. She didn’t either.

She took a wobbling step forward. Another.

He followed her.

People bumped up against him from behind, the pedestrian current spilling around them, but he made sure to block for her, a boulder in the stream. A few grumbles and passive-aggressive sighs.

Moving even more hesitantly, Anca drew closer to the top step. She stopped at the verge, peering down. A sense of depth was suddenly apparent, stairs tunneling sharply into the underworld. And yet, she faced it. She set a trembling hand on the metal rail, cringing at the bustle drifting past them, and the screech and rumble of trains moving invisibly below.

“Move it, buddy, wouldja?”

Anca didn’t seem to hear. Evan kept his back squared, shielding the lane behind her. In front of him, her shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell.

Tentatively she started down.

He followed.

23A Man Who Answers to No One

The subway train rocketed beneath the metric gigatons of the city. Across from Evan, Anca flinched at every noise. Brakes squealed. Fasteners and joints rattled. Ventilation whooshed. They clattered through darkness and light, darkness and light.

One of her diminutive hands gripped the other, a timid clasp on her lap. Seeming to notice, she unclenched her fingers and sat taller.

They’d moved through three cars before she’d chosen her spot. A few weary souls swayed at the far end, dangling from grab bars or pinning down blue molded seats of easily disinfected plastic. The sparseness of riders and the cacophonous rush of gray noise offered them privacy. As the tracks banked, the train slammed into an abrupt snake-wind, the trailing cars vanishing through the intercarriage windows and then slotting back into realignment like a magic trick.

At the jostling, Anca winced, the ketorolac wearing off. Over the course of Evan’s missions, he might’ve met a tougher person than her. But he could not be sure.