***ALEX***

It's nearly impossible to get too close to the Scoville truck's wreckage, because the smoke rises thick and fast and radiates waves of heat. Not too much trouble for AK, who can manipulate the flames away from the building and the cars even at a bit of a distance, but being a more ice-oriented water elemental, I'm struggling.

So is AK too, though. Only a couple of times pulling away flames and he's already having trouble breathing, so he grabs an inhaler from his pocket and takes a puff. I guess being a fire elemental doesn't prevent him from being asthmatic - how's that for ironic?

When he's done filling his lungs with misty meds, he turns to me and points to the column of concrete around which the truck's wrapped itself. "Think you can reinforce that with ice, maybe?" he asks. "It's gonna go down soon!"

I take a cursory look. "I'm not that good at ice...and how'd you know that's my elemental?"

He taps his forehead with his index finger. "I heard it. And I also heard you talking about ice being more your thing than plain old water." He tries pulling more fire away from the wreckage, and almost gets rid of it all, only for another car's engine to explode. "Dude, I'm no structural engineer, but even I can see if this column goes, the whole building's in danger. All those morning moviegoers..."

I shake my head, not at him, but at whoever designed this building with the parking garage covering the first three floors. Bad enough that they had to do it that way in earthquake country, but now there's a whole new danger threatening a building with some of the most ridiculously top-heavy construction I've ever seen.

While AK goes in closer so he can access the latest fire that needs to be removed, I fly back just enough to start lining the damaged column with ice. Heavy layers of the stuff, too. It's not really cold enough for it to last, I don't think, but if I layer it with enough below-zero ice (below-zero Fahrenheit, I mean), it should hold for a while. At least, until the professional firefighters come in. I don't know how long they'll take to arrive, but the police are first on scene - which is no surprise because the San Castiel PD is literally around the corner from this place.

And of course one of the very first things the cops do when the first cruisers squeal up behind me and AK is to yell at us, "Get out of here, kids!"

"Technically, I'm not a kid," says AK as he redirects more flames out of the parking garage. That's that exploding engine put out.

"What the...no, no, you shouldn't be here!" The nearest cop spreads his ebony-colored wings and actually grabs me to pull me away, while his partner flies in and takes AK away himself. "You all right, son?" he asks me.

I wince hard at the sound of him calling me "son." Sure, he looks nothing like Elijah - he's black, for one thing - but I can't help but associate that word with him.

I get control of myself very quickly, though. "I'm fine. I'm fine." I look up at the concern in his eyes, then down at the nametag on his chest - "Sanchez," it says.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Sanchez asks me.

"I...I wasn't." I lower my head so he can't see me blushing. "I just got here, and then all this happened..." I gesture vaguely at the wrecked truck, then look up to see AK taking another hit off his inhaler. I hope he's not using it up too quickly - and I wouldn't be surprised if he were, because while he got rid of the fire for the most part, the smoke still lingers heavily.

"Ugh, speaking of smoke..." AK reaches up to his eye, but his hand stops just short of touching it. "Is it possible to get smoke damage to contacts?"

I blink in surprise - and a bit of pain from imagining what he must be experiencing at the moment. "You wear contacts?"

"Yeah. It's always been one of the quickest ways to tell me and TJ apart - he never wanted contacts himself. He has sensitive eyes."

"Mmm. I think I do too." I bite my lip as I think of the one time Mom took me and Gabe to the optometrist, and all the shit they did to our eyes still gives me nightmares to this day. At least they didn't screw with our vision. Not that either me or Gabe ever had exactly 20/20 to begin with, but we were just not imperfect enough to really require correction of any kind.

While Sanchez is busy talking to his partner, AK leans over to me and whispers, "I wish I didn't keep doing that."

"What?"

"Speaking of TJ in the present tense."

I turn to him and see him actually remove his contacts and let some tears flow freely from his eyes. "Hey..." Even though I still don't know him all that well, I pull him closer for a side-hug. "It's all right. I do that too with my brother."

"You have a brother? Or..." He wipes his eyes again, realizing his mistake. "Oh. Oh man, I'm sorry-"

"Don't be. You didn't know." Though I'm a little surprised that he didn't go ahead and poke around my Instagram the way I did for his. Guess that's just another little behavioral quirk that sets me apart.

"All right, kids..." Sanchez comes back to us and opens the back door of the cruiser. "You're gonna need to come with us."

AK and I react with simultaneous incoherence. "Wait, what? "What the heck?"

"You're not under arrest," Sanchez says with a soft smile. "It's, uh, just to get your statements."

I eyeball the open back door. "You're really gonna drive us? I thought you guys worked just over there." I jerk my thumb at the curved roof of the building visible just beyond the parking garage.

"We brought the car out, didn't we?" Sanchez's partner, a redheaded white guy, points out. "Makes sense to just bring it back in."

"Stating the obvious as always, Seth." Sanchez shakes his head. Turning back to me and AK, he holds the door open, still waiting. "Boys, we gotta get outta here and let the professionals cover this."

I'm about to protest that, having lent my assistance to protecting Heaven from afterlife invaders, I've probably got about as many badass points as half the San Castiel Fire Department put together. (Well, okay, maybe a quarter. Three eighths at most. But the point still stands.) But Sanchez probably wouldn't believe me anyway. "Seth" might, though. But I'm more worried about giving Sanchez what he wants. And besides, I can't really be insulted by someone telling me I'm not a professional, not when I'm still three months shy of eighteen and have no career experience. (Although I was thinking about asking, when I get back to Coldfire Creek, if Mrs. Smythe could use a hand in the Smythe and Darknell café while I'm still at Balthazar.)

So, without further ado, I climb into the backseat, with AK right behind me, sitting behind the driver's seat. Which, of course, Sanchez takes seconds later.

The police station itself is a mostly underground building, very modern-looking inside, like it was built sometime in my lifetime. In the lobby, one of the few parts of the building that's terranean as opposed to sub, the desk sergeant looks up as the two officers escort us in from the motor pool. "Sanchez. Moss. Who are these two?"

"Witnesses to the truck crash," says Sanchez.

"Scoville's driverless truck," I add without thinking.

Sanchez's eyes widen as I finish speaking. "How...how did I not notice that before? Come on, come on, I gotta get your statements..."

AK and I exchange glances. I'm getting the idea that whatever Sanchez has in mind now, it's more than just taking statements. His tone of voice, for some reason, leads me to believe that he knows something about Scoville we don't know, but I can easily guess with my TV-watcher's brain.

It turns out I'm not really off the mark with the idea that Sanchez is putting in my mind.

The first thing I notice on his desk when AK and I follow him into his cubicle in the downstairs bullpen (technically underground, but high-ceilinged and very well-lit with ground-level windows over our heads) is the nameplate reading "Ofc. Osvaldo Sanchez."

The second thing I notice is the stack of notebooks piled behind said nameplate.

"These ain't 'notebooks,' boys," Sanchez comments, nodding to us and sitting behind the desk. "These are lore compendia." His partner - Seth Moss, apparently his full name is - snickers, and Sanchez narrows his deep brown eyes at him. "At least nobody comes in here to touch this crap while we out the door, huh?"

"I thumbed through your Walking Dead notebook while you stepped out," calls a distant voice with a slight accent.

"Lore. Compendium. Get it right, Khan!" Sanchez flips through the first notebook...sorry, lore compendium in the pile. Inside, I see a mass of words in black and red ink. It looks like how I imagine Tarantino's notebooks would look with the rough drafts of his screenplays. Or, more likely, the sort of notes a superfan like Yvette Nicole Brown would take. "Yeah, Khan," Sanchez grumbles, "I knew you weren't to be trusted. Who else would draw a heart over Negan's name...but I digress." He lays the Walking Dead lore compendium aside and picks up the rest, one by one, piling them on top of TV's ultimate zombie cockroach show. Fringe, Firefly, Attack on Titan, Designated Survivor, The Blacklist, Riverdale (that one, AK knits his eyebrows upon seeing it, and I don't blame him given that show's history of legendarily bad LGBT+ rep), Blindspot, and Colony appear on the duct-tape labels on each compendium as Sanchez searches them all.

"Got nothing for this," he says. "At least, none that I keep here. I got plenty more at home, but I can't exactly go and pick 'em up right now..." He consults the Blacklist compendium a little more closely. "Well, they did once say the pipeline explosion was eco-terrorism, but aside from that I've got no connection to San Castiel."

"There's no connection to San Castiel." Moss leans over the wall separating this cubicle from the one next door, which is presumably his. "Nothing happens in San Castiel."

"Which is why they sent me here." Sanchez rolls his eyes, closes the compendium, and moves the full pile back to where it started on his desk. "Seth, uh, could you cover for me a minute?"

His eyes, golden-green like those of my ex, widen. "What, you want me to take the boys' statements?"

"We're right here, you know," I mutter to myself. AK stifles a snicker.

"You're not exactly unqualified for it. You're an officer too." Sanchez gets up from his seat and leaves the cubicle, then stands aside and waits for me and AK to get up. "Officer Moss will get your statements in his office," he tells us, "and don't worry. I'll be back in ten minutes if you can wait that long."

"I'm not so incompetent that it'll take me that long," Moss grouses.

"Exactly. You gotta stall. That's something you're dangerously skilled at, Officer." He salutes us all, then runs off the way we came in.

I turn to Moss. "Stall, huh? How're you gonna do that? Shoot the breeze in between each question?"

"Maybe." Moss shuffles his papers, which are far less organized than those of Sanchez. "He's not wrong..." His voice trails off for a moment, and I follow his gaze as he looks up to the window and looks at a distant figure winging away from the building. Sanchez, I think. The split-second glimpse I get shows me black wings.

"Hey..." A brown-skinned woman in an officer's uniform walks by with a man in civvies  - East Asian, not South like her - right behind her. "Sanchez wouldn't really be that pissed at me for touching his notebook, would he?"

Moss sighs through his nose. "Lore compendium, Khan."

"No need to correct me," Khan laughs. "He's not here." Her face turns serious. "And I promise, I'm not the one who drew that 'I ❤ NEGAN' or whatever in his book." She winks at us. "That was all Bennet here."

Bennet crosses his arms over his broad chest. He's a stocky, muscular guy, so I'm not surprised Khan backs away just a smidge. "You lie."

"No!"

"You're a lying liar who lies, and I know what you're thinking. It's not cool to screw with the order of his compendia. He needs that order. It's not like he gets much of it in his life already."

"But he's a cop," AK says. "Doesn't he keep order?"

"I'm talking about his personal life," says Bennet.

"Which we're not here to learn about," I say. "We're supposed to be...but hey, he said to stall, and you guys are doing a pretty good job of that."

"Always at your service." Bennet bows theatrically.

"Hey, how come you're not wearing a uniform?" AK asks him.

A huge smile expands on Bennet's face. "That's 'cause I'm not officially police. I'm just a consultant."

Khan purses her lips. "And they assigned him to me because, for some reason, the no-nonsense lady detective always has to get the quirky-ass consultant-"

"Excuse me, you are not no-nonsense," Moss points out.

Khan tilts her head at him. "I see what you did there, Mr. Double Negative. You see? No nonsense."

"Also no shenanigans, no fooling around, no party, no disco-"

Moss clears his throat to stop Bennet. Shame - I was liking the Talking Heads reference he was putting together, even if he were getting the lyrics out of order. "Would a quote-unquote 'no-nonsense' lady detective intentionally piss off one of her colleagues by playing with his system?" Moss crosses his own arms, but being leaner than Bennet, he doesn't look nearly as badass doing it, I don't think.

"All I wanna do is have some fun," Khan says with a soft laugh.

"Is it harmless fun, though?" I ask.

That question manages to pierce her armor, and other than opening and closing her mouth a couple of times, she has no response. Instead, she changes the subject. "Let's go, Bennet. Don't we have someone to interrogate?"

"Do we?" Bennet scratches his head. "What about?"

"The truck crash," says Khan. "Moss, you were there, right? Where's the suspect?"

Moss scratches his head. "There isn't one," he says.

"The truck was driverless," I point out.

Moss writes that down. Yes, he actually writes it, longhand. Even though he has a computer on his desk, and a very flash-new one too from the looks of it, the fine arts of handwriting and triplicate forms appear to not be completely lost in this particular police department. "Driverless," Moss repeats, finishing the word off. "How'd you know that again?"

"There was no cab," says AK. "The truck was basically all trailer."

Bennet whistles. "Oh...now I think I know which compendium Sanchez went to pick up."

"Which one?" asks Moss.

Bennet steps into the cubicle, kneeling behind me and AK and tapping our shoulders. "I can't resist showing off for newcomers...all right, which one of you wants to go first?"

"For what?" I ask apprehensively.

"Projection, of course."

That's when the penny drops for me. "Oh...you're a demon?"

"That's why I'm a consultant," Bennet says brightly. "I've got a gift the angel cops in this place don't have." He sizes me and AK up. "Why not you?" he says, looking at me. "You ever seen projection before? It's a little like stage hypnosis - it'll blow your mind for a minute, but it's totally harmless."

Behind him, Khan covers her mouth to stifle her laughter. "He didn't tell us to stall, but of course you're always game."

I'm not at all game for this, but you know what? I'll go along with it. Bennet's a hell of a lot more trustworthy than, say, Elijah, and I don't even know him. Swallowing nervously, I look him in the eye and say, "Go ahead."

Just to make us all laugh a bit, Bennet closes his eyes and puts his index fingers on either side of his temple. Then he opens his eyes and locks them with mine again. I feel a rippling brain-quake of sorts, like my cerebrum is a pond and Bennet dropped a rock into it. I expect to see footage of whatever show he's got in mind, whatever show's lore compendium Sanchez is looking for...but I see nothing. The brain-quake only lasts a couple of seconds before stopping.

"Whoa, whoa, what the..." Bennet shakes his head. "That was...oh man, I didn't realize. I'm sorry."

"Didn't realize what?"

"I can't project into your brain." Bennet feels his forehead, as if it's hurting. "Gahhhhh...you got some serious psychic blocks, kid."

"Didn't that happen when you tried to show off for Sanchez too?" Khan asks.

"It did..." Bennet stands up for a moment, scratching the back of his head. "And I got a pretty big whammy on him too. Trying to project into him is like running headlong into a brick wall." He kneels again, hemming and hawing for a moment. "Uh...I hope you don't mind me asking, but...are you on the spectrum?"

Good thing he asked if I don't mind, because if he hadn't, I most certainly would have. I really don't like people knowing about it, especially if they're not my friends. I've seen people look down on me for it, or worse, refuse to believe me because I'm "too articulate" or something. (I mean, you've seen me talk to Fionna. And Kelly. And...hell, anyone I love, because even so, I have such an inability to articulate my feelings at the worst of times.)

"I am," I say, only because, again, he asked as politely as possible.

"Thought so." Bennet cracks his knuckles. "Neurodivergence makes you immune to projection - from neurotypical people, that is. Like me, contrary to popular belief." A beflustered Khan coughs. "Someone else on the autism spectrum might be able to project into your mind, but otherwise, you're pretty well-protected."

"Wow. Never thought of it that way."

My voice is flat, maybe not intentionally, but in any case, it's got Bennet running a bit scared. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you-"

"You didn't. Don't worry." But I don't look at him as I speak. I'm a little lost in my brain at the moment, thinking about something else. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised Scoville's getting involved in some strange shit."

"What kind of strange shit?" Moss asks. Everyone's looking at me now, even AK, and I feel trapped under eight small but high-intensity spotlights.

"Just your garden-variety strange shit involving secretive Silicon Valley corporations out to wreck the world."

"What makes you say that?" asks Khan.

I pull my feet off the floor and draw my knees up to my chest, not-so-secretly wishing everyone would just leave me alone. But in the absence of most of my friends, I decide, in spite of myself, to go ahead and speak my mind.

"There's been some stuff happening..." I clear my throat, hating how I'm starting this out. "There's another company besides Scoville, called Peppermint, and last night my brother told me they were trying out some new possession tech-"

"Wait, I thought you said your brother was dead."

I feel the blood rushing from my face when I realize AK's right. And...you know what? I doubt any of these guys - or lady, in Khan's case - would believe me, but I'm going to go ahead, because Sanchez wants us to stall, so I might as well just spill the beans.

"Yeah, he's dead. But we still talk to each other. We share dreams. And last night, he told me about this thing where Peppermint used one of his squad as a guinea pig for this...well, he called it 'digital possession.'"

I lower my head so nobody can see my face. Not because I don't want to see their reactions, but because I don't want AK to hear my thoughts.

Especially when I can't help but dwell on the fact that that one squad member who got digitally possessed was none other than his own twin.