apartment. Her sweatshirt was dampened with rain. She shook off the hood, took a few steps, and accidentally knocked over one of the bags of recyclables that James had been collecting inside his front door for the last month. Plastic water bottles, empty split pea soup cans, and drained Mountain Dew bottles rolled off in all directions. Kick trudged down the hall after a can. She was always chasing after something.
“You’re late,” James’s voice called from the living room.
Her brother’s apartment was two stories below her own, and the layouts were identical. The main part of the space consisted of a living room, dining room, and kitchen, all with an open floor plan, high ceilings, and oppressively large windows. The private spaces—the bathroom and bedroom—were cramped, with ugly carpeting. Kick thought there was a metaphor there somewhere.
“You better not bring that gun in here,” James called.
Kick crammed the last plastic water bottle back into the bag. “Fine,” she said. She took the Glock from her sweatshirt pocket, double-checked the safety, and tucked the gun into her backpack. Then she slung the backpack over one shoulder, made her way past the rest of the recycling, and followed the hallway to the living room.
James was sitting at his computer as usual, his headphonesaround his neck. All three monitors were on. Programming books lined the shelf above his desk, along with coffee cups and science fiction paperbacks and Mountain Dew bottles with an inch or two of flat soda at the bottom. His desk was pushed up against a floor-to-ceiling window that was covered with inspirational posters that he had Scotch-taped to the glass. Try to be like the turtle—at ease in your own shell. Change your thoughts and you change your world.
“You were supposed to be here at eleven,” he said without turning around. “And when I said you couldn’t bring the gun in here, I didn’t mean you could bring it in here if you put it in your backpack.”
Kick scrutinized her backpack. James hadn’t even turned around. She didn’t know how he did that. Still, she ignored him, retrieved a piece of cheese pizza from a grease-stained pizza box that she had almost stepped on, and flopped down on his sofa and set the backpack at her feet. The interior wall of the living room was a collage of travel posters. Not the vintage painted kind with the art deco lettering, but the travel agenty kind, the ones with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower and the words Visit Paris! scrawled across the corner in a cursive font. James had never been out of the country. Kick spotted a water bill on top of an issue of Macworld that was open on the sofa next to her, and she stuffed the bill in her sweatshirt to pay later.
“Did you see the Amber Alert?” she asked.
Her brother was still pretending to type something on his keyboard. “Is this going to be like Adam Rice?” he asked.
Adam Rice had disappeared three weeks ago from the yard of his mother’s apartment building in Tacoma. It’s what had set Kick off. She didn’t know why—she never did. Maybe it was because Tacoma wasn’t that far away. But from the first moment she saw Adam’s picture, she felt a connection with him.
The pizza was cold and stale. Kick took a bite anyway. “I have it under control,” she said. She got a pack of throwing stars out of her backpack and stowed them in her sweatshirt pocket. She could relax better if she had weapons immediately handy.
James spun his chair around to face her. His Doctor Who TARDIS T-shirt had a green crusty stain on the neck. Split pea soup, Kick hoped.
He pushed his brown hair out of his eyes and adjusted his glasses. “So the app worked?” he asked. He had recently started trying to grow a mustache. Kick didn’t have the heart to tell him that he still looked fifteen. Most people were surprised to learn that he was two years older than she was.
“You designed it,” Kick said. “Of course it worked.”
“What