The Loop

July 31st

“What time was it in your vision again?” I knew I’d asked this question a dozen times already, but I wanted to keep things straight, keep us on mission, keep us from forgetting we were on the clock. And, if I was being honest with myself, I just didn’t want to be forgotten or ignored.

Jaleel looked at me and he didn’t bother trying to hide his impatience. “10:00 p.m.,” he said. “Thirty-eight hours and twenty-two minutes from now.”

We’d gone from the restaurant the previous night over to our house, where Lincoln had demonstrated his power to us. With no preamble or explanation, he’d touched his computer, which had lit up with an unearthly green glow, the screen flickering thousands of times per second, and his eyes had rolled into the back of his head, the same green glow seeming to pulse behind them. After a few moments during which we were concerned and not sure if we should intervene, he’d pulled his hand away and told us what he’d seen.

He’d been away from his computer most of that day, and he almost never watched the news. If he had, he’d already have known that Shannon wasn’t the only one missing; police were reporting that her boss, Gabriela Garcia, had disappeared as well, and police suspected superpowers were at play. Curiously, the news didn't mention Shannon at all, though the police were aware that she was missing, too. As it was, he’d gotten all of that information and more from a few seconds of physical contact with his computer.

He’d told us that the police had searched the entirety of the office park where she worked, that the surveillance cameras hadn’t told them anything because they’d been disconnected during the renovations, that they’d searched the apartment of the coworker they believed was responsible and found a number of disturbing items, including a notebook with pictures of Shannon’s face taped onto crudely drawn images of pigs and porcupines, along with several jars full of small animal bones.

“Most of that couldn’t possibly have been in the news,” Jaleel had said. “That isn’t the sort of stuff police share during an ongoing investigation.”

“I hacked into the police files. I also saw that they’re considering me a person of interest. Her parents’ words regarding me were not flattering at all,” Linc had responded. His tone of voice was neutral, as if this wasn’t the strangest conversation he’d ever had. But, given what I knew about his ‘job’ and the things I tried my best not to know about what he did online and the people he associated with, maybe it wasn’t.

“You hacked into the police files?” I’d asked, looking at him incredulously. “You hacked into the police files by touching your computer for a couple seconds?”

He gave me an impatient look. “Yeah, Harp. It’s a superpower, it’s not supposed to be something anyone else could do. Wouldn’t be real super otherwise, would it?”

He always made a show of being a little impatient and condescending with me, and normally he didn’t mean anything by it—although it still bothered me—but I could tell this wasn’t just regular sibling stuff; he was really worried. It was strange. I wasn’t used to seeing him worry like that; he was ordinarily fairly self assured. He wasn’t good with people, though, and maybe that’s what was agitating him, maybe he felt he’d be better off trying to save her on his own, like he couldn’t trust the rest of us to have his back, or to keep up with him.

I had watched him more closely, made note of how his shoulders tensed and his teeth pressed hard together, his eyes roved constantly, and his foot tapped incessantly. I’d looked at myself, at everyone. I’d noticed those actions mirrored around the room and started to get a sense of how crazy this whole thing was. Maybe Adam had been right. Maybe this wasn’t a job for a bunch of inexperienced kids.

I’d agreed with the others that we should handle it ourselves. And why? Not necessarily because I really believed it. Because I couldn’t stand to be on the outside looking in? Because I needed this, to be part of this.

“Okay, so … is this a dead end? Where do we even start looking?” asked Jaleel.

“Can’t you tell us?” I’d asked him. “Use your power again, see if you can see where she was found.”

“I can try, but it doesn’t really work that way, I don’t think.”

“Never mind any of that,” said Linc. “We all need sleep.”

I’d looked at the clock and realized he was right. It was almost three in the morning. We’d all hunkered down in Linc’s room, not wanting to leave him alone. I hadn’t been certain I’d be able to sleep, but as soon as my head hit the pillow, I’d found myself waking up to light streaming in through the open window.

“Ready to try your power, yet?” I’d asked Jaleel as soon as I determined everyone else was awake, and after bugging him one final time about what time it had been in his vision.

We all watched intently as he knelt on the floor and put his hands on his knees, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. We waited for what must have been five minutes before anyone spoke.

“Anything?” asked Christine, trying to keep her tone gentle but coming off impatient.

“I’m working on it,” he’d said. “I’m getting … impressions, but nothing like the vision I had before.”

“Impressions?” I’d asked.

“I sort of see the T.V., but the news is different. Top story is about a house fire on Finch Ave., but … I don’t know. It’s fuzzy.”

He was about to say more but Linc shushed him, holding up a finger as if to tell us all to keep our mouths shut.

“Excuse you?” asked Jaleel.

“Just shut up a second. I’m thinking.”

We all looked at Lincoln, Jaleel with more than a little contempt on his face. I tried to be patient, because I knew how bad Lincoln was with social interactions, but even I couldn’t act like he wasn’t being a dick. Still … it was his girlfriend missing, so we all cut him a little extra slack.

“You said it’s fuzzy?” asked Lincoln after a minute.

“Sure. Like looking at an image through frosted glass, I guess. And the sound is muffled. Colors are washed out. All that.”

“And you also said that from what you could see, the news story had changed.”

“Yes. Where are you going with this?”

“Just bear with me for a minute.” He reached over and placed his hand on his laptop again, and scrunched up his face, his eyes closed.

“Try your power again,” he said.

“Okay, but—”

“Just fucking do it, okay? Please …”

“Whatever, man.”

Jaleel screwed his face up, too. It was almost comical seeing the two of them sitting across from each other, both red faced with mental effort. If not for the seriousness of the situation, I might’ve made a joke about how they both looked constipated. I had a tendency to fall back on humor in tense situations. I had a tendency to drive people away doing things like that.

“Holy shit,” said Jaleel after a minute. “Did you do that?”

“I think so,” said Lincoln, an uncertain smile flashing across his face.

“Do you two want to clue us in on what the fuck you’re talking about?” said Christine.

“Still fuzzy,” said Jaleel. “Still indistinct, but … the top story changed again. ‘Stock Market Tumbles in What Looks Like Massive Cyber Attack Centered in Texas’.”

“You crashed the fucking stock market, Lincoln?” I asked.

“No, dummy, try to keep up. Jaleel sees the future. I didn’t actually crash the market, I just focused really hard on thinking about doing it. Planning it. Now that I know it would have worked, I don’t have to actually do it.”

“So the point was to prove what? That any changes Jaleel sees in his vision prove that we’ve actually changed something between now and then?”

“Exactly. And we know from the fact that my initial vision had already changed when you guys had me use my power a few minutes ago that we had already done something to change the course of events. If a local woman had been murdered, it would have been the top story, so we must have already been on the right track to saving her.” Jaleel spoke rapidly, excitement evident in his voice.

“Unfortunately, no, I don’t think so,” said Linc, frowning. “The top story initially was that her body was found, so all we know for sure is that we’re on the right track to stopping that. Maybe she still gets murdered but something we do ensures that the killer hides the body better. Unless the top story says definitively that a local missing woman was found safe, and the man responsible for taking her was arrested … or killed, we won’t know for sure.”

“Fuck,” said Christine. “This is hurting my brain.”

It was funny to hear Christine say something like that. She was smart, smarter than me I was sure. It was just that right now she was in a room with two of the smartest people I’d ever known, and both of them had powers that gave them more information than the rest of us could easily keep up with.

“But this still helps, though, right? We can just keep getting Jaleel to use his power to confirm whether we’re on the right track or not.” I looked directly at Jaleel and spoke to him. “Can you look at something else?” I asked. “Like, some point further in the future, or closer? Give us more information to work with?”

“I … I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, but it feels kind of like now that I’ve looked at this one event, my power is locked into that specific time. I think it’ll stay that way until that time actually passes.”

“But what you’re seeing is just like … whatever it is you yourself will see at that time, right? You’re just looking through your own future eyes, hearing with your own future ears?” asked Linc.

“It seems that way, sure,” said Jaleel, a curious smile spreading across his face. I was noticing he almost always smiled when he was working through a tough mental problem. “I think I see where you’re going with this, give me a second.”

He screwed up his face in concentration again, and the rest of us sat silent. Lincoln stared at him patiently, Christine and me more lost and dumbstruck.

“I see … outside, the street. The address: something-something-seven Finch Ave.”

“Again, you’re going to have to share with the class,” I said.

“I just … I just made a mental plan,” he said, “that if we found the place where she’s being held, I’d go back there at 10:00 p.m. tomorrow, then I’d walk outside and look at the address.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that we cheated. We found her, somehow, and Jaleel here just skipped past all the hard work.” Lincoln looked pleased. Jaleel smiled at him.

It was funny to see how well they worked together, as long as they were mutually tackling a mentally challenging task.

“Finch Ave.,” I said. “Wasn’t that the street you said before … Where the house fire was?”

“Oh shit, it was,” said Jaleel. “Gotta be the same place.”

Lincoln already had his hand on his computer again. Many things—the computer, his hand, his eyes—were glowing bright green. “His mother’s house,” he said quietly. “His mother lives on Finch Ave. They don’t get along.”

He pulled his hand away from the computer and continued, “I watched all the surveillance footage from every traffic camera or internet connected business security camera between the office and that address from the past week.”

“What’d you see?” I asked. I didn’t bother to point out how absurd his statement was.

“Not a damn thing. If he took her there, he took some strange back way. But he must’ve taken her there, otherwise what was Jaleel doing there tomorrow night, right?” He looked uncertain, now.

“I was doing something with my hands,” interjected Jaleel. “I was waving them around my face, like this—” he waved his arms back and forth in front of his face, forming an ‘X’ and then spreading them out over and over. “Maybe I was saying ‘don’t come here’. Couldn’t hear a damn thing, though.” Now he, too, looked uncertain.

“Well, we have to start somewhere, and we still have lots of time,” I said, trying to inject some optimism into the conversation. “Linc, can you call up a few pictures on your computer?”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Faces,” I said. “This guy’s, his mother’s, Shannon’s.”

Lincoln touched his hand to his laptop three times, and three separate images appeared. I was already familiar with Shannon’s face, of course, but a refresher didn’t hurt. I focused on each of them in turn, and morphed my own face to match. The others gave me confused looks. They also looked a little awed, and I won’t deny I was pleased at that.

I shrugged. “Might come in handy. Now, are we going to get over there and see what we can see, or are we going to sit around on our asses all day?”