“I mean, the guy said he’d train you to be a superhero,” Ben said, mouth half-full of jello. “You gotta call him.”

  “He definitely didn’t say that,” Ali laughed. His cheeks hurt a little from smiling. Ben was up and about today, only a little drugged-up, and in good spirits. His surgery had gone close to flawlessly, and other than a shortened colon and a spontaneous appendectomy, he was on track to recover fine.

  “He said you had super powers. He said he’d train you.”

  “He said I was 'special.' And, more importantly, he said someone was gonna try and kill me.”

  “I mean, that tracks. That’s standard superhero shit.”

  “I’m not fighting crime.”

  Ben laughed, tossed away his snack, leaned back in his hospital bed. “Right. Not a lot of supervillains in Minneapolis. It’d probably be overboard to throw a fastball through a guy’s head because he’s jacking someone’s Honda.”

  Ali choked, caught between laughter and stifled unease, which only made Ben laugh harder. “Again, man, I’m so fucking sorry-”

  “Save it, dude. Nothing to apologize for.”

  “I blew half your guts out onto the Cane’s parking lot.”

  “Oh my God, did someone clean that up?” Ben giggled, clearly still enjoying the knock-on effects of his painkillers. “I bet some poor janitor had to mop my colon juice.”

  “Seriously, man. If you’re pissed, it’s totally-”

  “You didn’t mean it. You couldn’t have meant it! It was the freakiest freak accident in history. I’m close to back to normal already, and I got a cool story out of it.” Ben shrugged.

  “Well-” Ali hesitated, kept his voice low. “You might wanna hold off on telling it. You know, in case-”

  “Right, in case mystery van man wasn’t lying about there being people out there to get you.” Ben sobered up a little. “Shit, yeah. Yeah, that’s a little freaky.”

  “That, or, like, what if the government wants to cut me open or something? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” Ali made a little distraught noise, at a loss. “Like, do I call the guy?”

  “Definitely call the guy.”

  “After that, what? Do I shut up about it? Do I just go about getting a summer job like nothing happened? If I’m too loose talking about it, and, like, my mom’s smart fridge or Siri or whatever is snooping on me and tells the government, do they scoop me up in the night and take me to Area 51, or do they not know anything at all?” Ali frowned, wrung his hands. “Like, there’s no manual here. I’ve got no idea what my next step’s supposed to be.”

  “Well.” Ben leaned forward, scratched his chin, affected introspection in a way that suited his heavy, intense features. “You were saying, you know, right before you rocked my shit, that everything was about to change anyway, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. So maybe just, like, put your head down and charge into it? The uncertainty. If everything’s gonna be chaos anyway, at least now you get to go into it with badass baseball powers.”

  “That was… surprisingly nuanced, man.”

  “I’m not just a pretty face.”

  Ali let himself laugh a little, but the tension winding itself around his gut had only loosened a fraction. He looked around the room, aimless, then stood.

  “Cool if I take a quick walk? I’m feeling a little cooped up.”

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  “That a good idea? What if one of the Bad Guys jumps you?”

  “Better he do that out in the open, I guess.” Ali was surprised by how little of his current anxiety was centered on the maybe-fact that he was the subject of a manhunt. It didn’t feel real to him. There were several more pressing matters weighing on his mind right now, and the specter of semi-possible random violence didn’t strike him as solid enough to care about. “If I get shot at in here, he might clip a rando.”

  “Worrying about collateral damage, striking out on his own for the good of the civilians,” Ben nodded knowingly. “Superhero shit, man. Go take your walk.”

  Ali laughed again. Lots of laughing tonight. God, it was a relief that Ben would be okay.

  He was out into the chill of the late night -- or, no early morning -- a few moments later, headed off down the sidewalk. He pulled his hood up, half to keep his ears warm, half for the feeling of anonymity, and walked.

  Ali liked to walk, and he knew the area well. He was the brooding type, prone to constant, incessant thinking, the kind that can only really be dislodged and straightened out with physical movement. He’d tried getting into running, but found that the fatigue of it, the slamming footfalls and heavy breaths, disrupted his mental rhythm too much to be meditative.

  So he walked. He’d covered most of this part of town plenty of times; the hospital was only about a mile from home. He knew the cross-streets well. He took a sort of native pride in this, how familiar the topography of his home was, how intimately acquainted with the city’s character he’d become.

  He liked Minneapolis. He liked the hilly, winding streets. He liked all the random bullshit millennial-core cafes. He liked the river, with its dead mills and cross-lacing of bridges. He like the drunk-kid byways that bordered the university campus, the rows of frat houses and student lodges slumped in their foundations and scattered with constantly-changing decor as new crops of students cycled in and out.

  He liked the trees. How blindingly, overwhelmingly green, like hedges more than anything, they got in the spring. He liked the seasons, how they marked the time. Even winter, which he’d admit went on maybe two months too long, only made the eventual explosion in to spring all the more cathartic.

  He passed the squat, detached building where he’d gone to daycare from ages five to ten. The graffiti-spattered stairway the skaters liked to grind down. The Thai place that sold Pad See Ew so amazing that Jenny had repeatedly insisted she’d marry it if it were legal to “wed a noodle.” The marshy park where he’d been bitten by a goose once as a kid.

  Sure, there was a darkness to the city, too. But the darkness wasn’t that complicated or scary, when you got a glimpse of it. Carjackings and drugs, alleged kidnappings, asshole soldier-cops. These things were there, but also, really, not there, not like people who’d never stepped foot in the Twin Cities said they were. Ali wasn’t scared to walk the streets at night. He wasn’t afraid of the alleys, didn’t think twice about leaving his mom’s van parked by the curb. There wasn’t anything especially evil about Minneapolis, and there were plenty of things that were especially nice.

  Or maybe he was biased, because it was home. Maybe he was blind to its faults because it’s where he’d learned to ride a bike and drive a car and become a man, a home his grandparents had staked out for their own, one that his parents had already been fully nativized to before he’d been born. It didn’t feel like something that would hurt him. It didn’t make him nervous.

  What did make him nervous was the future. And his newfound, and apparently impossible to replicate, ability to throw baseballs through torsos. And the sudden appearance of the well-dressed van intruder. And-

  And the woman who had stepped out from behind a streetlamp and grabbed his arm.

  Ali jolted, let a stupid, surprised cough escape his lips. The woman who’d grabbed him was in all black, wearing a hat and sunglasses for some reason. He opened his mouth to cry out, to ask the lady what her deal was, to plead with her not to do this. He had barely managed to inhale before the woman, subtly shimmering with an odd, dancing half-light, shoved her arm through Ali’s chest and severed his spine.

  Quiet, and then recognition.

  Ali was lying down, in repose, relaxed. All around him, non-voices chattered. They were familiar voices, with overtones of his mother, his childhood best friend, Sylvia, his grandma, his pet cat. There was a sense of being in a happy, waiting crowd, like a group killing time before a concert, standing in line for an amusement park ride.

  After a pause, Ali joined the throng, added his voice to the pleasant susurrus. The manifold conversationalists delighted at this and made room for him in the indescribably wide circle, and he was talking with all of them. Reminiscing.

  The more he talked about them, the more solid his memories of the Good Times became. The chorus of voices affirmed his every detail, ratified his every happy recollection, and he felt these memories solidify, wrap him in their comfort.

  He basked in the glow of a cherished time fully remembered, enjoyed it for the blink of an eye and the span of a million lives, and then it was gone.