His friend was in the same place Yuri always found him when he came over, hunched over the worktable against the back wall. Whatever project Hugo was working on was the only well-lit thing in the room. His friend spoke to him without looking up, "Did you leave your boots on the mat?" Yuri sighed. "Yes. Your mom's going to have to find a different reason to kill me this time."
Hugo swung around, the magnifying specs he wore while he worked transforming his eyes into huge, blinking windows. "Good. Because she *will* kill you," he deadpanned.
Yuri half-grinned and reached for a spare chair. "Yeah, yeah. So, what's so important?"
"It's not what, it's who," Hugo said, having already reassumed his former position. Yuri could now see what his friend was curving his spine over; on the pitted, flash-burnt surface of the worktable was a thumb-sized, insect-like contraption with many reflective surfaces.
"Cool, is that a drone?" Yuri asked, leaning close. Hugo put out a protective arm to block his friend from getting too close to the little machine, prompting a little sigh from Yuri. "Come on, it's not like I'm going to inhale it or anything. Wait, did you say *who*? And shouldn't that be 'whom'?"
Hugo carefully picked up a miniature screwdriver and continued what he had been doing when Yuri came in, which was adjusting something inside the thing's opened carapace. "I did, and maybe," he said calmly. "Yuri my friend, what if I told you I had an answer to our Ortiz problem?" This was the best news Yuri had in weeks. That guy was making their lives hell at school, and the idea that his reign of terror over the two friends might be over was more than he could have hoped for.
"Excellent!" Yuri crowed. "So, how's this little fella going to take him out?"
Hugo paused in his fine-tuning, as if taking a moment to process what his friend had said. Yuri knew that at these times, it was best just to wait and let Hugo catch up. Actually, a better description would be to wait for him to come back from wherever he had mentally run ahead to. "It's not what the insect-cam will do," he finally said, "but rather what the insect-cam is going to show us."
Yuri was starting to understand. He stayed quiet and let his friend make the necessary adjustments, not speaking again until Hugo snapped the robot's tiny shell back into place. "So where do we start this path to Ortiz's destruction? I'm freakin' sick of that guy."
Despite his hatred for the boy, Yuri acknowledged that Ortiz was really what had brought he and Hugo together as friends in the first place. Being equally victimized by a bully was really underestimated as a common bonding experience between bookish teenage boys.
"It begins with opening the window," Hugo said, yanking off his magnifying goggles and gently cradling the tiny robot in his palm. Yuri jumped to attention, crossing to the small window that was the only spot in the walls of Hugo's room that wasn't covered by shelves of random parts, gadgets, and old-school tech manuals. In the beginning of their friendship, Yuri asked him why he kept real honest-to-G books on these shelves, but Hugo insisted that he knew them so well that he could actually find info he was looking for more quickly than looking it up online. Yuri eventually got the idea that Hugo considered his room as just an extension of his brain.
So when the window was opened, Yuri felt the change in air pressure and obliquely wondered if the high, cool air was actually changing his friend's thought process at all. Then Hugo was flicking his cupped hand at the open portal to the building's airshaft, and the little insect thing disappeared utterly in the darkness.
Hugo dashed over to one of the monitors that were constantly on, to the side of his workbench, and Yuri could now see that one of them was displaying a tilting, wheeling image of the world just outside the window; clearly, it was the insect-bot's onboard camera.
After a few seconds of observing the camera's gimbals working to right itself and the nighttime window lights turn from streaks into stable, recognizable squares of light, Yuri whispered to his friend, who was watching the screen intently, "Where is it going to go?"
Hugo nodded approvingly. "Not far. I've got to pilot it, but I wanted to make sure it could orient itself properly first." With this, Hugo reached out and grabbed a wireless Playstation controller off his workbench. He began manipulating the twin thumbsticks, and the camera's view swung around first in one direction, then the other. Then it began to rise. Yuri watched, rapt.
Passing windows, each cascading down the screen as the camera lifted, gave only the most fleeting glimpses of the lives going on inside them -- someone standing at a kitchen sink, someone reading a book at a dining nook table, light from a TV flickering in a doorway. A moment of utter blackness, and then the drone was above the roof line, showing the city spreading out in gridded lights. As soon as he saw this, Hugo started piloting the drone sideways, spinning it around to get his bearings while raising it even higher above the apartment building's roof.
Yuri saw the first orange flash before the camera's eye stopped swinging. "Whoa. What's that?"
He could hear the smile in Hugo's voice as he said, "That, my friend, is Ortiz's worst nightmare." With this, he gave another tweak to the controller that clarified the situation.
In the monitor, Yuri was looking at a part of his apartment building he had never observed before: the roof. It was a plain of tarred gravel, stitched together with an elaborate array of randomly placed pipes and conduits. But there was one area that might have been the largest uninterrupted flat space in the entire building, maybe the entire block. In the middle of it stood a man, effortlessly juggling five little balls of fire.
It took a few seconds of watching for Yuri to accept the fact of what he was seeing. The figure was facing away from the camera, the shadows of the five burning orbs making his shadows roll across the floor around him in a staggeringly complex pattern . The balls themselves arced almost perfectly from his hands to a spot about two feet over the curly mop of hair on his head, and came down just as steadily. His arms moved with utter confidence, swinging through the air seemingly without thought.
"What the... what's he doing?" Yuri muttered.
"Precisely what it looks like he's doing," Hugo said, concentrating on keeping the floating camera steady. And for a few long moments, they just watched the young man, mesmerized. The flaming balls never faltered in their arcs, transferring from hand to hand over and over again. It might have been a process that had been going on forever, and would continue indefinitely into the future.
All this time, Hugo had been slowly letting the camera drone drift through the air, but Yuri didn't notice until he realized the monitor was now showing the young man from the side. Even though his profile was being buffeted by the five competing light sources constantly spinning around it, there was nothing to read in his features but calm and mastery of his movements. In a city where it sometimes seemed like everyone's expression rode the fine line between rage and confusion, Yuri was mesmerized by witnessing someone's utter peace.
"Keep watching," Hugo said, and started to move around to the front of the young man a little faster. Yuri saw the precise moment when the subject became aware of the camera, his eyes flicking away from the distant hills to focus seemingly directly on them.
"Shit, look out!" Yuri yelped, but it was too late. As easily as he had been juggling the little balls of fire, the young man altered the path of one of them, flicking it directly at the hovering drone. The ball grew larger and larger in the monitor, arcing toward them along a perfectly crafted path. The light grew, grew, and suddenly went out.
Yuri involuntarily flinched, unable to help it. But he immediately realized that, although the fire had disappeared and partially overloaded the camera's optics, the effect was repeating; the other four fireballs were coming, in rapid succession. Yuri took a half-step back every time one appeared to hit the camera, but by the end he noticed that Hugo hadn't moved an inch. His hands were as steady on the controller as ever.
For a moment, overwhelmed by the accumulated bright light, the screen registered nothing. Then, after a few blank moments, tiny spots began to return to several spots around the screen. They were still and steady, and after a few more moments resolved themselves into the familiar gridded pattern of background city street lights.
"He's gone!" Yuri yelped, once he had gotten himself oriented to where the drone was, and where the young man no longer stood.
In response, Hugo dropped the drone down to the roof's surface, and set down the controller. "He just ran while the camera was blown out," he said, already half-jogging out of the room. "Come on!" he called.
Yuri followed him out of the small bedroom, through the apartment, and out onto the landing next to the stairs. In a flash, the pair assumed casual poses, pretending to be looking at something fascinating on Hugo's quickly-produced phone. After only a few seconds, the young man from the roof, looking both taller and gaunter than he had in the multiple sources of pure orange firelight, came down the stairs. None of them looked at the other, and the fire-juggler passed right by them, continuing down the stairs to the next floor.
"That's some good fire-work," Hugo said, loud enough to be heard but still staring into the depths of his phone.
The young man stopped, and it was all Yuri could do to keep from bolting away down the hall. He kept his eyes fixed on the little screen Hugo held as well.
When the young man's voice reached them, it was deeper than Yuri expected, sounding almost sepulchral in the concrete stairwell. "So that was your camera."
Only now did Hugo look up to meet the young man's gaze; Yuri still couldn't summon the courage to. "Yep. Tonight was just the first time you noticed."
Yuri resisted the urge to just grab Hugo's arm and drag him back into his apartment. What the hell was he thinking, antagonizing this guy? Although he still didn't dare look directly at the young man standing a few steps below them, Yuri did notice a thin stream of smoke leaking from inside the sleeve of the young man's combat jacket. It rose through the still air in a straight stream, and started to pool on the underside of the concrete stair directly above him.
"You go out there most nights," Hugo said, emboldened by the silence. "Sometimes you juggle, like tonight. Sometimes you roll balls of flame across the floor, and you can sometimes get them to turn corners. One time, you used your finger to make a huge loop of flame that stayed in the air long enough for you to step through it."
Another long pause followed. "And?" the young man said. Something had changed in the tone of his voice that made Yuri finally raise his head -- a kind of resignation, or maybe relief that his secret wasn't entirely his anymore.
"And," Hugo said, as if he had prepared the words long beforehand, "I wondered if you might want to try using your talents out in the real world." Then came the longest silence of all, only broken when Hugo continued, "We can pay you. There's an injustice that we need to make right, and we can't do it ourselves."
Yuri finally looked at the young man's face. His expression was hard to read in the harsh shadows on the stairwell, but behind the annoyance there seemed to be a mischievous smile trying to break through. "What did you freaks have in mind?"
---
The three of them sat on the cool grass, shielded from the sidewalk by two lines of shrubs that had carefully curated into squared-off shapes. Yuri noted that, when the young man (who eventually volunteered that his name was Troy, shortly after he had agreed to come with the two of them on this errand) sat crosslegged, his legs curled around his long form in such a way that he looked like little more than a teetering bundle of sticks. The guy clearly had nutritional issues.
Seeing him this way, idly poking his fingers around in the grass, evaporating the late-night dew just enough to create a low-lying fog around the trio, gave Yuri courage. Or he was finally seeing that Troy was just another guy, like him and Hugo. In any event, he was able to ask, "What do you make them out of?" Hugo asked.
Troy turned to the questioner, a puzzled look on his face. "I don't make them out of anything. Look." He turned his right hand palm up, took his left hand -- the one he had been touching the steaming grass with -- and placed the tip of his index finger in the very center of the raised palm. He held it there, then slowly, purposefully began to lift it. In the gap between the fingertip and the palm, a tiny sphere of light appeared and grew, dim at first but gaining brightness along with size, until it was like a ping-pong ball, which Yuri realized was the exact size of the ones he had been juggling earlier that evening.
"Whoa," Hugo breathed. "That's so cool."
"Here," Troy said, and jerked his palm, tossing the little fireball into the air. It landed squarely in Hugo's lap, right down into the gap of his crossed legs. The boy yelped and started to flap his legs, but before he could really move the fire was gone. It just disappeared. Yuri wondered how much control Troy had over how long it lasted once it left his hand.
Troy barked a laugh, and even though it was little more than a chuckle, making the shock of longer curly hair above his forehead flopping down, it was the most exuberant display the boys had seen him make. They were too surprised by the sudden outburst to really react to it.
Troy picked his hand up, turned it over as if he himself were trying to understand his power. "I could always do it, I think. My mom told me stories about how things sometimes would heat up around me when I was a baby. Nothing major, just little things. A blanket would start smoldering, a plastic block would melt. Sometimes she said she'd have me in my lap and she'd just start to sweat like it was the middle of summer. I think I did my first fireball when I was, like, seven."
Yuri had been going over Hugo's plan in his mind, not really paying attention to the young man. Ortiz would be coming out of his apartment building any moment now, heading down to his late-night job at a local bowling alley, which usually left him nodding, half-asleep, through his first few classes.
Troy's was continuing to talk. "That reminds me. There was this one time, when my stepdad--"
"Ssh!" Yuri said, having heard the door of the building behind them opening. Recovering quickly, Hugo was swinging around on his knees, trying to see through the hedge whether their quarry was coming into view. He held perfectly still for a moment, and then his shoulders sagged. "Nope. Not him."
As Hugo settled into his old posture, sitting on the grass so that Troy was between him and Yuri, he said, "Okay, you're clear on what we're doing, right? We're not trying to hurt him, just scare him."
Troy sighed, still seeming to have some reservations about what they were about to do. "So what did this guy do to you, anyway? Just regular bully stuff?"
Yuri took no time to consider what he could have said before he blurted out, "Yeah, but he's, like, really bad. And it's not just us, either. He terrorizes everyone in our grade." This was stretching the truth, but the opportunity Hugo had managed to grab was just too good. He couldn't stop picturing the look that would appear in Ortiz's eyes once he realized that his victims now had someone with literal firepower on their side. And the way the lighting on his face would change as the fireballs got lobbed right at him... Maybe the show would be so good that the bully would pee himself a little bit. That would be so cool.
"Yeah?" Troy said, still sounding skeptical. "So, he knocks your books out of your hand? Pushes you into lockers? What are we talking about here?"
Hugo jumped in, sensing that Yuri was doing more harm than good. "He's a holy terror. Even the teachers are scared of him. He slashed one of the vice principal's tires two months ago. There are rumors that he didn't get expelled because the school board is afraid of what he'll do for revenge."
Yuri couldn't help but put in, "And the teachers whose classes he's in get paid extra to put up with him." That was just a rumor too, but it was so pervasive it had to be true.
Troy kept looking back and forth between them as they gave their reasons for wanting the fear of God put into their fellow seventh-grader. His expression became less and less puzzled as they explained, which Yuri took as a good sign. And yes, what they were telling him wasn't precisely true, but it might as well be. The bottom line, the most important point they had to get across, was that Ortiz was a menace that no one wanted to put up with, and everything would be better if he were put in his place. And Troy seemed to be the only one who could give them any chance of doing that.
After they had fallen silent, Troy took one more look, from one to the other, as if to verify that their store of mostly-truths was spent. Then he said, "So what do you think is going to change, if I do what you want and scare this guy good? Will he suddenly become a better person, or will he just realize that there are now two people out there who are actually a threat to him?"
Hugo shrugged, and Yuri said, more honestly than anything he had said since sitting down, "I just want him to stop messing with us."
Troy sighed. "Look, fellas, I've been in situations like this before. There was this one kid, when I was a little younger than you--"
There was a click from behind them as the apartment building's door opened, and even though they were still hidden from view behind the hedges, both boys froze and their eyes went wide, as if they had been caught spraypainting the principal's car. Hugo threw up a hand to keep Troy from making another sound, accompanied by a quick "Shh!"
Troy did as instructed, and dropped his story. Hugo half-turned toward the apartment building, bobbing and weaving his head to see through the hedge's sparse branches. Once he had confirmed who it was coming out of the building, he turned back to the others. "It's him!" he stage-whispered, equal measures of fear and excitement in his voice.
Then Yuri was turning around too, anticipating the start of the action. He had just noticed that Troy wasn't moving to join them when Hugo stood up and called, "Hey, Ortiz!" His friend's voice was surprisingly loud in the mostly empty street, echoing off the flat faces of the rows of identical apartment buildings. Then he was standing too, swiveling around to face their common nemesis. "Yeah!" Yuri crowed, just to hear his own voice bouncing back at him in the same, powerful way.
The figure coming out of the building nearest to them stopped in mid-stride and turned its head their way. It was Ortiz, all right, his hands frozen in the process of lifting the furred hood of his ubiquitous puffy orange jacket over his head.
Out of the corner of his eye, Yuri saw Hugo nudge Troy with his knee. The young man was still sitting on the ground, and didn't look like he was thinking of getting up anytime soon. A little claw of panic caught in Yuri's throat.
"The fuck'ziss?" Ortiz said, not even trying to match the boys' volume. He seemed genuinely puzzled that someone would show up outside his house. Once he had stopped he just hovered there, making no threatening moves, just assessing the situation.
"We got something to tell you!" Hugo said, and Yuri couldn't tell if his friend was mirroring Ortiz's tough-guy accent consciously or not. "And we brought someone along to help us!"
Yuri was starting to become afraid that Troy might not stand up at all. He might just flat-out refuse to do what he had agreed to. But, just as the last remnant of Hugo's call was fading out, the young man unfolded his gangly limbs and stood, turning around as he did. Yuri hoped that, from where Ortiz was standing some forty feet away, it looked as though a tall, menacing figure was sprouting up out of the bushes between the two of them.
"What's your story, Stretch?" Ortiz said to Troy, letting his hood fall back, turning toward them and puffing out his chest defensively. "What are you hanging with these stains for?"
At this point, Troy was supposed to start his juggling act. He had been instructed to accumulate as many flying orbs as he could (he claimed his personal best was eleven), and then lob them one by one toward Ortiz like he had done to the camera drone, making sure that they landed on the sidewalk, getting progressively closer and closer to the bully, like he was being strafed from the air. This, Hugo envisioned, would send his adversary running back into his building, and likely would mark the end of his ever messing with either he or Yuri again.
Troy didn't do this, however, at least not right away. Yuri found himself holding his breath, waiting for the moment when the young floppy-haired man would begin to perform his magic. The moment drew out longer and longer.
"I heard that you're being a real dick to these guys," Troy said, his voice carrying clearly across the long space even though he wasn't speaking particularly loudly.
Ortiz considered this, then shrugged, his entire coat moving up and down as one unit as he did it. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe they deserve it."
"How so?" Troy asked. Yuri and Hugo looked across their new acquaintance, jaws dropped, unable to understand what was going on. Was Troy actually having a conversation with this juvenile delinquent, their arch-enemy?
Ortiz really seemed to be thinking this question over, as if no one had ever thought to ask him before. Finally, he said, "I don't know. Maybe I'm sick of them having their own little conversations, like they're better than everyone else."
"Wait a minute!" Hugo blurted out, his voice no louder but sounding much more desperate than Troy's. "We never did anything to you!"
Ortiz's dramatic eye roll was visible even from that distance, because he did it with his entire body. "Man, you don't even remember? Last year, you two were talking about Masterson's test? I came up and tried to join you, but you barely even noticed I was there. You went right back to your own private little discussion."
"Until you smacked us on the back of our heads!" Yuri shot back.
To which Ortiz immediately responded, "Yeah, but you noticed me then, right?"
Hugo was drawing in breath, ready to launch another verbal volley, but Troy lightly touched a finger to his arm and Hugo decided not to continue. "You're right," Troy called out, "They're not too good at listening, are they?"
"Nope," Ortiz said.
"I mean," Troy continued, "here I am, a guy who can do this--" His hand on Yuri's side turned palm-up, and for the briefest instant a bright beam of light shot up from it and went straight into the sky, piercing the high, uniform layer of clouds that had draped itself across the city that night, then just as quickly was so gone that Yuri had to force himself not to instantly forget it had been there, "--and they don't even ask any questions. About who I am, why I can do it... They didn't even bother to find out what my name was. They just wanted to get me to come down here and scare the shit out of you."
Ortiz had changed his stance during the split-second display, backing one of his feet away into a more defensive pose, but his face had managed to remain calm. Finally, he said, "Well, what *is* your name? And how'd you get so awesome?"
Troy lowered his hands, and looked from his left to his right, locking gazes with first Hugo, then Yuri. Finally, he turned back to Ortiz. The young man only half-attempted to step gingerly through the hedge separating them from the bully, ended up breaking several branches as he passed through. Then he was walking right up to Ortiz, saying, "Thanks for asking. It's actually a pretty fascinating story."
Hugo and Yuri just stood there, not daring to move. Was this a trick, some sort of ploy so that Troy could get close enough to really put the irons to Ortiz? The two older boys met where Ortiz stood, and continued their conversation, turning away and walking off down the sidewalk, like new friends.
"What the hell just happened?" Hugo said, watching the two shapes fade into the night.
"I don't... we him asked what his name was, didn't we?" Yuri wondered aloud.
"I'm sure we did," Hugo said. Then, after a pause, "I think."
Neither of them moved, not knowing whether their bully problem had just been solved, or if they had stumbled into a much worse, brand new one.
