Hero (Gone 9)

Cruz’s eyes went wide and a blush rose up her neck. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

Armo waved that off. “Shorts and a T-shirt. Come on. They gave me one of those tent things, a cabana or whatever—I didn’t even ask. It’s got room for, like, six people. And they already brought me a massive fruit-and-cheese platter.”

Cruz said, “Give me a minute and I’ll find a picture I can morph into.” She laughed, and it sounded just a bit hysterical. “You could be hanging out with Olivia Wilde or someone.”

Armo made a face. “Yeah, see, I don’t know who that is. Come on, Cruz, don’t make me carry you.”

“You wouldn’t want that, Cruz,” Shade said with a careful neutrality that Dekka recognized as knowing mockery, earning Shade a discreetly hidden upraised middle finger from Cruz.

“Okay, I’ll change into shorts.”

Armo flopped onto the sofa, nearly bouncing Shade off, and said, “That’ll take a minute. So in sixty seconds or less, explain this whole space-alien-extra-universe thing.”

Dekka looked around at them, seeing happy faces. Good. It was good to be happy. You never knew when it might be for the last time.

CHAPTER 2

Manhattan Mayhem

“FOOLS AND THEIR money are soon parted,” Bob Markovic said to his daughter, Simone. “It’s not illegal to profit from people’s stupidity.”

“No, just immoral,” Simone snapped.

It was an argument they’d had more than once. A tired argument, but one still fed by powerful emotions on both sides. In some ways it was a proxy argument, Simone knew, a stand-in for a series of grudges between them, most especially Simone’s decision to live with her mother and not her father following their divorce.

“Yes, well, morality and profit don’t always walk hand in hand,” Markovic muttered. “I live in the real world, not some college seminar.” He stood leaning against the stone balustrade of his fourteenth-floor balcony and waved his hand to encompass New York City in late afternoon. Slanting light turned the buildings far across Central Park into dark silhouettes and dabbed the trees with yellow and orange. “Different worlds, different realities.”

Bob Markovic was in an expansive mood, which Simone knew meant that he’d had a good and profitable day. The payday loan company he owned, Markovic’s Money Machine (offices all across the Northeast and upper Midwest), was doing gangbusters business. The whole country was on a mad panic-buying spree, grabbing up all the things they could never really afford, booking travel to places where people expected to be safe from the rolling apocalypse of the rock—New Zealand was very popular—and stocking cellars with emergency supplies and guns.

Guns, guns, guns, like that will keep them safe.

Simone Markovic had not had a productive day. She’d attended two classes at NYU—accounting and art appreciation. The accounting class had been a compromise to keep her father happy enough to continue paying tuition. The art class was her own choice. She didn’t really enjoy either class, but she would be damned if she’d admit to her father that art per se was not going to be her thing. What she wanted to study was filmmaking, but that seemed so unlikely to be useful that she had a hard time fighting for it in the face of his (and even her mother’s) skepticism. But for some time now, ever since she’d made the decision that film would be her thing, she’d seen the world around her in a frame, a series of shots.

Fade in: The arrogant tycoon is framed against a setting sun.

Simone had also put in a shift at an Italian restaurant, working as a hostess, a personal choice meant to give her some appreciation of what life was like for working people. The answer was: hard. The waitstaff messed with her because they knew she was a little rich girl, slumming. They cut her out of pooled tips, snapped at her every mistake, and never invited her for after-work drinks. Her manager would not stop hitting on her, despite a thirty-year age difference and her explanation that she liked girls, and even if she switched teams it would still not involve dating a married man in his late forties.

And then there was the matter of the general restaurant-going public. Simone tried to love humanity, but from the vantage point of the restaurant business, it wasn’t easy.

So, all in all, Simone was in a bad mood and inclined to pick a fight. “You give them loans you know they can’t pay back.”

“That’s the most profitable kind of loan,” Markovic said with a laugh. “You don’t want to loan a man a dollar and get a dollar and ten cents back the next day. You want to loan a man a dollar and have him pay you just the ten cents interest, but day after day, month after month after month. At the end of a few months you’ve made a dollar profit, and they still owe you the first dollar.”

Cut to: A mother of three counts the money she’s borrowed to buy Christmas presents, knowing she can never repay it.

Simone clenched her jaw. She was eighteen, white, a college freshman with blond hair she wore in a haystack bob, a cut meant to look casual, even indifferent, but which had cost three hundred dollars at her mother’s favorite salon. From the ground up, she wore a pair of red Doc Martens, torn blue jeans, a green-and-black Hillbilly Moon Explosion T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. She wore silver rings in two lip piercings and three more in one ear. Simone’s intention was not to look like a little rich girl, but she was self-aware enough to recognize that she just looked like a rich girl trying not to look like one.

Simone Markovic lived with her mother over on the West Side, and despite arguing with her, too, on a regular basis, they actually got along well enough. This was her weekend with Dad—who approved of very little about Simone except her last name. They had a contentious relationship, had since Simone had transitioned from girlhood to young womanhood. They were two strong-willed people with very different worldviews. But had Simone been given truth serum, she’d have admitted that she loved her morally blind father and knew that he loved her in return.

Bob Markovic lived on the fourteenth floor of a prestigious building on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. The condo had four bedrooms, a separate office, and maid’s quarters. It was decorated in what was almost a parody of masculinity of the aggressive, Hemingway variety. Markovic liked to hunt, and he liked to claim trophies, and he didn’t much care whether a beast was endangered or not. The main room of the apartment was painted the green of a pool table’s felt, with dark walnut molding. The walls were festooned with mounted animal heads: a water buffalo spread its gracefully curved horns nearly five feet; a polar bear looked startled; an entire eight-foot-long tiger had been stuffed and now stood menacingly in the corner by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf.

Simone hated that room.

Slow pan of room reeking of sociopathy and masculine insecurity.

The apartment also had a long, narrow balcony opening onto a view of Central Park. It was on that balcony that Markovic and Simone sat nibbling on a plate of crudités and drinking a bottle of Tuscan red wine. Simone’s father might be a rapacious businessman and a skirt-chasing hound who had cheated on Simone’s mother repeatedly, but he was mellow where underage consumption of alcohol was concerned.

There were times Simone wondered how she would ever get through a weekend with him without being able to drink. Probably, she thought, he understood that and took the easy way out by keeping her glass filled.