Page 26 of Phoenix Chosen 2

The thought is not quite a voice inside of my head, but more like a feeling in my gut. I look up. Standing at the far side of the store are a pair of police officers speaking to a mall security guard. The guard points at the fitting rooms and the officers look over, right at me.

“Oh shit,” I whisper, dropping down to a crouch behind a rack of cargo shorts. I peek over it and see the two officers heading in my direction with their hands positioned on thebacks of their holstered pistols. Yeah, this ain’t no coincidence. They’re coming for us.

I run into the fitting room area, ignoring the protests of the employee manning the desk.

“Kalistratos!” I shout. “Get out here, we’ve got a problem.”

He pulls the curtain open, and I see that he’s only gotten so far as to try on one of the shirts.

“No time, we’ve gotta run. We’d better hope these things fit you.”

“What is it?” he asks.

“Police. Someone must’ve recognized you from the news.Fuck, I shouldn’t have brought you with me.”

“I can fight them,” he says.

“No, we’ve gotta get out of here. Right there, emergency exit. GO! Take the jeans with you!”

As we make a run for it, the clerk at the desk starts to shout and wave for the police. “They’re getting away!” he yells.

I smash through the emergency exit double doors, dragging Kalistratos behind me. We’re in a service hallway.

“This way,” I say, moving right. “There’s another exit out this way that’ll take us closer to the south side of the mall. We can get to the street from there.”

And then what? Wait for the bus to come? Kalistratos could use his powers to get us out of the mall, but once he’s out ofenergy we’ll be out of options. We could end up stranded, and the cops will definitely be looking everywhere for him.

Think, Tyler.

We hang a right and nearly collide with a girl in a Pretzel Wagon uniform coming out from a side door. She screams and falls against the wall, the spring-mounted pretzel on her hat bobbing madly back and forth like a jack-in-the-box. I hear the double doors bang open far behind us, and the clomp of the police officer’s shoes on the linoleum tile.

“Come on, Kalistratos!” I urge him. “Hurry!”

With a frustrated roar, he grabs the sides of his too-tight sweatpants and rips them right off his body. The pretzel girl screams again. He’s completely naked from the waist down.

“Much better,” he grunts, speeding up.

“Oh, great,” I say. “Shirt-cocking it. Why didn’t you put the jeans on in the fitting room?”

“They intimidate me,” he says.

We slam through another set of double doors and are outside again. To the right is the plaza fountain. To the left, the parking lot. Suddenly, I get an idea.

“This way,” I say.

We dash toward the center plaza, then quickly go left to the shops across from the fountain. It feels like all eyes are on us thanks to Kalistratos. I quickly drag us into a passageway to the left where the bathrooms and vending machines are. There’s another door here with a passcode that leads to a passage thatcircumnavigates the entire mall, used for shipping and stocking for all the shops and the food court. But what I was hoping to find here is now nothing but an empty alcove with a couple of wires sticking out of a graffiti-tagged wall. There are still bolts sticking out of the concrete where the old payphones used to be when I worked here.

“Shit,” I mutter. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Kalistratos tears open the package of underwear and hops around as he attempts to put on a pair upside down.

“Other way,” I tell him.

He gets them on, then yanks off the Velcro sandals I’d given him and pulls on the pair of jeans with the tags still dangling from the waist. I sneak to the end of the hallway and peek out into the plaza. The cops are there, looking around. People are pointing.

“Fuck,” I say. “Kalistratos. Can you use your powers? I need you to do two things.”

“Of course.”

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