I’d met Bruce a couple of months ago in a coffee shop that had, a couple of days later, been damaged by an electric fire. It wasn’t looking good for reopening. So, finding him required the use of the trusty internet.

No, he wasn’t a guy I’d date, and frankly his daughter was hotter…did I say that out loud? Too old. But he supposedly knew something about weird stuff, and something about Norse runes. So he was the go-to guy if I could just track him down. He’d know something about what might be with the horn. Or not. At least he could confirm my odd knowledge about Tyr’s rune and justice. Or deny it and let me know for sure I was going nuts.

He agreed to meet me in Old Town Alexandria, where there was a real, honest-to-goodness magic store. Or, at least, a witchcraft supply store, which amounted to the same thing. I sat on a bench outside, enjoying the heat and contemplating the good ice cream place on the waterfront.

Bruce joined me. A thin, greying man, old enough to be my father or grandfather. He felt like no threat at all, almost as if it wasn’t really a man sitting next to me, but some genderless figure – never mind that I knew he was married and had two daughters. Maybe he was just that old. Or that married.

“Hey. I wanted an opinion on something.” I’d sketched the rune, and showed it to him, as the first thought.

“Tir. Or Tyr’s rune.”

I nodded. “I saw it used as decoration. Was wondering what it meant.” The confirmation, though, elevated my heart rate. I should have been relieved at the evidence I wasn’t insane, but I wasn’t. “No, that’s not true. I thought I knew what it meant.”

“That’s good. You’re remembering something.”

“Runes?” I felt my lips quirk, the gesture not quite voluntary.

“Lots of kids mess with them at some point,” he pointed out. “Because they think they can tell the future. Because they’re pretty. Maybe…” He stood, abruptly. “Let’s go inside.”

I followed him, curious. The interior of the store looked innocent enough. It was lined with books. In the center was a glass case containing some very nice…and presumably quite expensive…jewelry. The more interesting stuff was towards the back. Statues. Incense sticks. Rocks.

Rocks. And some had runes on them. I moved to look at them. Set under glass and on top of velvet pouches.

“Runes,” Bruce said. “Divination runes.”

“I know,” I found myself whispering. But maybe that was all it was. That I’d played with them before, messed with them as so many kids did.

“Maybe you should get some.”

I wanted to argue that I was broke, but I couldn’t. All I could do was stare at the marked rocks.

I knew I shouldn’t be out late at night. But now I felt like tempting fate, or perhaps making it, and I felt as if it didn’t matter. I could win any fight I got into.

Yes, I know that’s a fast way to get shot, but it also proved to be a good way to avoid being molested. As strange as it might sound, people generally don’t mess with you if you look like you’re ready to beat them up. Confidence goes a long way. And I felt it, in a way I hadn’t before.

You might wonder how I’d gone six months without knowing I could fight? I’d been smart enough not to get into any. Until now, and now I was looking for them. Looking for ways to explore exactly what I could do. I stopped outside the pawn shop again, wondering how that ceremonial sword would feel in my hands.

Nah. Nobody used swords these days. I’d just gone to a lot of self defense classes. But I knew in my heart that wasn’t it.

The horn. It was there again, then gone, but I knew now it was just…something to distract me. Maybe something intentionally to drive me crazy, not in the literal mental insanity sense, but in the sense of making me not think straight, want to hurt things. If that was the case, it had succeeded. I sure as heck wanted to hurt things. And didn’t particularly care if they hurt me back.

Tyr’s rune.

Justice. I toyed with the idea of being a vigilante for a moment, but this was the real world. People who tried that kind of thing usually got yelled at by the cops at best, arrested at worst. There were a few who’d gained a sort of local notoriety and were tolerated.

Reals, they called them. Real superheroes. And I toyed with it, because it would be more productive than wandering through Northeast at night half hoping somebody would try to mug me.

Somebody had tried to kill me. That meant I was important in some way I couldn’t remember. Somebody would try again, and I knew who I needed to talk to.

Somebody who might know how to deal with Mr. Otter.

I needed to talk to somebody – but it sure as heck wasn’t going to be my therapist, Kanesha, or Mr. Otter. Snag was, I had a pretty short list of people I wanted to talk to.

And it got even shorter when I thought about the gun in my pocket…the one I didn’t have a license for…and the entire situation. How could I involve anyone else? At the same time, I needed to talk to somebody. Which all went around and around in my head.

It was only part of why I was pushing my school-provided lunch around the plate. All the healthy food initiative had achieved around here was smaller portions and crappy produce. That lettuce looked like it had taken a round trip to Mars before being put in the salad. I didn’t want salad, either, but it had been that or mystery meat, and nobody ate the mystery meat unless they were starving.

If it even had meat in it. Maybe it was that pink goo stuff they were always accusing McDonald’s of putting in their nuggets. Or horse. Well, that would be meat, but it wasn’t the kind of meat I wanted to be eating.

I tended to be vegetarian at school lunch if I could remotely get away with it. They sometimes did these cheese croquettes that weren’t half bad. But the worry and anxiety were gnawing at my stomach.

I hadn’t felt in danger when he’d pointed the gun at me. I’d felt in no danger at all. Then Barry Clark sat down next to me. He always got teased about having a name put together from two superheroes.

Somehow that made him more tolerable. There was something about somebody being teased like that that made them…less likely to be jerks, I suppose.

“You look like you need a friend, Jane.”

“Nah. I was just contemplating calling the food police to arrest this lunch.” I’d brown bag, but I was supposed to have the school lunch. They’d pay for that. They wouldn’t up the grocery budget. At least it wasn’t my only meal of the day.

“Tell me about it. I think they’re trying to get rid of free lunch recipients by starving them to death.”

It wouldn’t be his, either. His mother was a hair dresser, and quite talented – she’d done mine before. They had money, by the standards of the inner city. “Okay,” I finally admitted. “The sub shop got held up yesterday.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Nah. But they were long gone before the cops got there and they’ll never catch them. Masks, gloves, the works.”

“Well, we know about the cops and colds around here.”

I certainly did. You didn’t rely on the police for, oh, anything. Much less actually catching criminals. All they were good at was riot control. They’d had plenty of practice at that. “So, yeah, I’m a bit shaken. Getting a gun pointed at you will do that.”

As edited as it was, telling somebody made me feel better, and Barry was decent, and looked at my eyes not my breasts. If I was going to date anyone, it would be him, but he was so uninterested I thought he was gay or something. Typical. The nice guys don’t want you and the jerks…

“It will,” he said, sounding as if it had happened to him. “Perk up, Jane. They probably won’t risk coming back to the same place.”

“I don’t know. I think they might.”

“So, no stray memories?”

She wasn’t a bad person, for a therapist. Doctor Howlett. Made me think of wolves, that. I shook my head and lied to her face, “None.”

I wasn’t going to tell her what was going on, this feeling that I’d been on vacation and now it was over, but I really hadn’t remembered anything. Except how to beat up muggers.

Nothing useful. “At least I’m not writing bad goth poetry.”

She laughed. “I almost wish you would. That’s surprisingly normal. Most teenagers try bad poetry at some point. Or bad fiction. But usually bad poetry.”

Occasionally, I supposed, somebody tried good poetry and made a career out of it. “I’ve tried bad poetry. I don’t have any talent, so I stopped.”

“Sensible.”

I sometimes got the feeling she almost liked me. Or at least found me easier to deal with than most of her “cases.” I wasn’t depressed, I had absolutely no desire to kill myself, and I had no interest in drugs.

I just couldn’t remember a dang thing, but other than that, perfectly well adjusted, me. And failing all of my classes. “For what it’s worth. I need to find something I’m good at. Ideally something that’s not flipping burgers.”

“I think you’ll catch up. Besides, that’s what GEDs are for.”

She was entirely too cheerful about the matter. I scowled a little. “I seriously…look. I can’t catch up. It’s like I never went to school. I’m starting to think my real parents were incompetent homeschoolers.”

“Maybe they were. That’s even a data point for finding them.”

Maybe I didn’t want to find them. Heck. “Isn’t it true that sometimes people develop amnesia because they hate their life?”

“Sometimes.”

“So, how do we know I’m not forgetting them because they’re annoying or crazy and I don’t want to go back?”

Gently, “If we find them…”

I couldn’t just get up and leave, but I knew. If they found them before I hit eighteen, I had to go back unless there was a good reason.

And the thought of doing so…was completely empty. No fear, no desire, nothing. As if they weren’t worth my notice. Or as if they no longer existed.

Obviously, I wasn’t getting any answers. I rather suspected the horn held some, I wasn’t going to do as Mr. Otter suggested and steal it, though. Even if that was somehow what I was supposed to do.

I wasn’t about to talk to my city-provided therapist about the matter, though. Oh, I’d talked to her plenty, but I wasn’t going to give her ammunition to put me somewhere more, shall we say, secure than the group home.

Which would throw me out as soon as I turned eighteen, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was, in fact, doing my level best not to think about that, but as I went up the steps it felt a little more like home than it had before. I was probably getting used to it. I’d at least managed to finish my ice cream.

Kanesha was at the top of the stairs. She waved cheerfully, then vanished into her room. She’d do well if any of us did – her favorite hobby was studying and she was applying for tons of scholarships.

Me? Wherever I’d been for the first fifteen or so years of my life hadn’t equipped me for high school. I didn’t know any of it, and it wasn’t, I thought, because I’d forgotten it. Sometimes I fantasized that something weird was going on.

Sometimes I thought my life was a comic book, mysterious enemies and hidden past and all. Well, no mysterious enemies, except for Mr. Otter, and he didn’t feel like an enemy.

Or a friend. Mysterious frenemy? Had no ring to it. I headed for my own room, closed and locked the door behind me. They gave us internet access. It was supposed to be for school. I used it to talk to people, but never revealing the truth. My Facebook friends thought I lived in a townhouse in Georgetown with a father who was a banker.

Yeah. We all want to build castles in the air, and I hoped mine would never sink, never fail, never fall. Now I flopped onto my bed, opening my laptop, checking my email.

Somebody was persistent. I’d told this particular person I wasn’t interested in a romance more times than I wanted to think about and certainly more times than I could count. I rolled my eyes and sent the firmest no I could think of. It was annoying that I couldn’t block email the way I could some other means of communication.

That meant two today. I didn’t think I was that hot, but some boys seemed to disagree. Then there was another email, from a sender I didn’t recognize. I almost deleted it, thinking it was spam. Probably I should have.

No name.

“Be careful. You’re being watched. Things are happening.”

As if I was supposed to know what it meant. Maybe I was.

Other girls got Sweet Sixteen parties. I hadn’t. In fact the only thing I’d gotten for my birthday was a cheap card from my housemates. I appreciated the thought. But it seemed I was getting other things for my birthday.

Six months. I’d only been in the house six months. Somewhere out there I probably had parents, but we hadn’t been able to find them. I was pretty sure Mr. Otter was not one of my relatives.

Pretty sure. But now I bought myself a belated birthday present. Ice cream from this little store near us, not a chain, a true mom and pops. They had better ice cream than any of the brand names, and I licked at the cone as I leaned on the window outside, my shoulders against it. I knew I looked like just another loitering teenager.

I didn’t particularly care. I had a right to loiter, given I was still working on the ice cream, and the day was hot – not unbearable as it could get here, but hot enough to make one want ice cream and soda with ice and all things cold. I didn’t deal with the heat well, either. A group of boys came down the street and I tensed. I knew those boys…three of them were trouble and the fourth was, well, “falling into bad company.” They had petty records – vandalism, minor assault, that kind of thing, but were clearly building towards worse.

For a moment, I let myself daydream about my parents finding me, about them turning out to be some nice suburban couple who could and would just take me home with them. To some nice school where the teachers actually taught instead of being glorified babysitters. To…

Then I pushed the thought aside to deal with the world as it is.

“Hey, Jane!” one of them called.

“Answer’s still no,” I called back. He’d asked me out before, a couple of times, but I wasn’t about to go with a guy who prided himself on his knives rather than his grades.

“Oh, come on, Jane. You could do a lot worse.” He walked towards me, thumbs in belt loops, all but thrusting his hips towards me.

I decided to find another place to be, but as I turned away, he reached to grab me. I slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t ever touch me or I’ll…”

“You’ll what…spoil that perfect good girl record of yours?”

“For you it might almost be worth it. Almost. But no.” I could feel it coiling within me, the knowledge of exactly how to put him in a world of hurt without doing real damage.

What the heck had I done in that forgotten past? Things no sixteen-year-old should know…and in the back of my mind, the smell of blood.

School was never fun. I don’t think it was fun for anyone, but for me? The girl with no past.

“Have you remembered anything yet?” Alfred Lockley. He wasn’t a bad guy to others, but he thought my amnesia was hilarious. Or fake. I think he genuinely thought it was some fake thing I did for attention.

“How to kick your butt,” I found myself responding, turning to walk away from him. It was tempting. It was always tempting, an undercurrent of desire to do something physical and painful, but not permanent, to the people who wouldn’t leave me alone. I was taller than most of the girls, even quite a few of the guys. I wasn’t a small woman, and I might well have had even more problems if I had been.

“Good answer.” It wasn’t a sardonic good answer, but it came from a teacher, so prudence dictated I acknowledged it with the merest of nods and headed for my escape. Early escape, so we could go to the jobs we all had to have. The school was all poor kids, foster kids, kids who were lucky if they had two parents. Lucky if the school lunch, calorie controlled in case we got fat, wasn’t the only meal they got that day.

By their measure I was lucky. I had to cook one day a week – we rotated – and they always gave us enough of a food allowance to not actually go hungry. It wasn’t good food, but there was enough of it.

Tonight wasn’t my turn, but that only meant I had to work, and trading school for the inside of Subway and sandwiches didn’t appeal. I was still not feeling quite right, quite normal.

How to kick your butt, and I made my way down the street. Walking distance. I’d deliberately looked for something walking distance and found it, I’d be there in plenty of time to be ready for the afternoon rush, especially if I cut through the back streets.

A whisper. Somebody whispered in my ear, but I couldn’t be sure what they were saying. I turned to see who it was, and there was nobody there, and the specter of madness rose up again, but as I turned I realized there was somebody behind me. With a gun.

“Drop your wallet.”

No. Way. I knew I was supposed to give it up, but if I did I wouldn’t be able to get home tonight, because that meant the bus. I was staring into the round barrel of a gun, frozen, knowing I had to do the right thing, but feeling red anger rise up within me.

Are you ready?

Would you like to meet Jane? Jane is 16 years old…she thinks…and she has amnesia. She can’t remember history or geography, but seems to be surprisingly good at beating people up.

Which is a good thing, because “they” really are out to get her!

Scene One should, if the code works, show up at 8am tomorrow!