Volume 1, Flashback 1: Take Your Hobby to Work Day (Patreon)

Eight years before The Event

First, I could think, so I was still alive.

Second, everything already hurt, so adding more pain came with diminishing returns.

Third, I had survived this much. I would survive whatever came next.

Fourth, I could still count, which meant my mind was still working and I could still rely on myself.

I picked myself up from the dented roof of the car I had just landed on.

My jump hadn’t been one of my best, but landing on steel that could buckle under my weight, unlike concrete—which definitely wouldn’t—had been a good choice.

Holding the backpack I had taken off in midair, I looked up at the roof of the building, now two stories above me. The van I had landed on was howling mercilessly, wailing into the darkness of the night like some kind of banshee and giving away my position to the people who had started chasing me the moment they realized what I had taken from them.

Groaning, I turned around and, grabbing the edge of the roof with both hands, carefully lowered myself down onto the sidewalk.

A few onlookers had already appeared with phones in hand and started taking pictures and recording videos of the scene.

Luckily, I was wearing a blond wig, makeup covering the freckles on my nose, a bandana hiding the rest of my face, a baseball cap, and a hood over all of it, so the chances of anyone recognizing me were practically nonexistent.

Unfortunately, suspicion lived right next door to impossible, so some of those watching were already raising their phones to their ears to report a teenager dressed like a thief falling out of the sky onto a car.

So I waved at them, smiling—though they probably couldn’t see it—and started walking away from my landing site.

“Stop! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” shouted one of the bigger, braver men who had been watching the whole thing. The heroic type who would do anything to shine as long as it cost him as little as possible. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him start toward me, waving his arms.

Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I broke into a light jog. A moment later, when he sped up into a run as well, the crowd gathering on the sidewalk forced me out into the street.

I ran just behind a passing car, stopped on the line between lanes to avoid a vehicle coming from the opposite direction and blaring its horn at me, then, seeing a stream of speeding cars ahead, started running along the line dividing the traffic.

Some of the oncoming cars definitely slowed down, but not all of them, so my would-be hero wisely abandoned his pursuit.

Unfortunately, the thugs whose weekly take I had stolen straight out of their car appeared at the edge of my vision, climbing down the ladder on the side of the building I had decided to jump from.

They were panting like hell, but they weren’t giving up.

When I reached the crosswalk from the street side, I quickly stepped onto it and ran across, only to be greeted by the awful sight of a police car directly ahead of me, its lights switching on the moment they spotted me.

The cruiser started moving a second later, but I darted into the still-open shopping mall and immediately began weaving through the people inside at full speed, heading for the escalators leading upward.

I shoved past a few of the more stubborn people who apparently thought their shopping was more urgent than my life, but one particularly oversized person was blocking the entire way up. The people chasing me had already appeared behind and were frantically scanning the area for any sign of me however, so I did the most reasonable thing I could and jumped onto the outside of the escalator.

Holding onto the railing and stepping along the narrow edge, I passed the heavier man, whose eyes went wide when he saw me jump back onto the escalator in front of him.

On the upper floor, I turned and ran along the railing overlooking the level below, then headed toward the stairwell leading out to the parking garage.

I ran inside without much hesitation and crossed the it toward one of the columns, where I quickly dropped my backpack onto the ground, took off my hoodie, bandana, and cap, and pulled a plaid shirt from the bag.

I tied the shirt around my waist by its sleeves, stuffed the things I had just taken off into the backpack, slung it over my shoulders again, and set off toward the cars at a calmer but still quick pace.

I studied their windows as I went, looking for an older model that someone might have accidentally left unlocked.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find one, and to make matters worse, the three men chasing me had just burst into the garage, shouting their threats at the top of their lungs. And because apparently things weren’t difficult enough already, I could hear a police car coming up from below.

So I calmly walked to the far end of the garage, where beyond a low wall and a short steel fence there was a street two stories below me.

I had already jumped from that height once today, but there was nothing stopping me from finding out whether the second attempt would go any better.

I quickly climbed onto the wall, squeezed past the edge of the steel fence, and stopped on the ledge for only a single breath.

Then I dropped down, twisting in the air and catching myself by my fingertips.

I swung for a moment and jumped, landing with bent knees on the ledge of the floor below. I flailed my arms to keep my balance and avoid falling backward when one foot slipped, then grabbed the metal fence with one hand and pulled myself closer.

I still had time to see the cruiser climbing higher up the ramp before I repeated the maneuver and dropped down to ground level.

As I landed, I pulled off the shirt tied around my waist, turned it inside out, and threw it over my shoulders. I quickly removed the wig as well, then stepped out onto the street looking like a completely different person.

An hour later, I was sitting in Mr. Penrose’s office, which looked partly like a gentleman’s study, with all those leather-bound books, a whiskey decanter, and a desk made of some kind of hardwood, covered with smooth red material that was pleasant to look at.

Part of the place, however, reflected the colder, more detached side of his personality. The entire warm space was surrounded by cold gray concrete, with square-based columns rising toward a high ceiling suspended about ten feet above the floor.

The columns themselves were chipped and damaged in several places, as though someone had struck them or fired high-caliber rounds into them, and all the broken debris lay scattered around their bases.

I took a seat in the worn green chair across from his desk and immediately ran my hand over the scratches I had made myself over the course of the last few years, during all the times I’d sat in front of him listening to what I was doing wrong and what I was good at.

He was the one who had found me in the orphanage when I was still a little kid and, in some way known only to him, decided that I had the talents necessary to become a good thief.

He turned to me with eyes sharp and appraising. He wore a three-piece gray suit with a burgundy tie. He was well into his sixties by now, but no one would guess it by looking at him. At most, he passed for being in his late forties. He owed that to constantly training both his body and his mind. Thanks to the guidance of him and his people, acrobatics and gymnastics had become part of my daily routine, and Penrose definitely practiced what he demanded of others.

His face was angular, weathered like the edge of an old coin, crowned with a head full of thick silver hair that matched his eyes—cool, calculating, and silver like the money he loved most in the world. He’d started wearing a beard recently too. It was immaculately trimmed, like everything else in his carefully curated life.

“…Third, it won’t cause Michelle any trouble. We’ll be delighted to arrange the meeting. Just tell me where and when…” he said into the phone, turning a coin between his fingers, letting it disappear into his palm only to deftly fish it back out with his pinky and roll it across the back of his hand.

Training my manual dexterity was the second most important thing I practiced every single day, whether with coins, playing cards, or lockpicking tools.

“No, nothing happened. See you then,” he said, and without even looking at the phone, ended the call with one finger and set the device down on his desk. “Alexander, good to see you. What do you have for me, my dear boy?” he said, pulling back his tall chair upholstered in red fabric before sitting across from me.

“I found those drug dealers Thomas mentioned during our last training session, the ones selling on your territory, and I thought I’d show some initiative,” I said, reaching into my bag for the bundle.

I grabbed it, intending to place it on his desk, but moved too quickly and accidentally knocked my sketchbook out of the bag. It hit the floor just as I handed Mr. Penrose the money.

“What’s this?” he asked, accepting the package and placing it near the edge of his desk.

His eyes were clearly fixed on what had fallen out of my bag, so I didn’t bother pretending not to understand.

“A notebook. I draw sometimes to train my hand, like you said I should. I figured it was another good way to do that… and, well… it calms me down when I’m stressed.”

“Are you stressed right now?” he asked, resting his chin on the basket formed by his interlaced fingers.

“Yes,” I answered honestly, bending down to pick up the sketchbook and handing it to Penrose. He took it with a quick motion and placed it in front of himself, opening to the first page.

“There’s no reason to be, my dear boy. The days when you got a beating for disobedience are long behind us, aren’t they?”

I nodded, but when he lifted his eyes from the page—where I had drawn the hallway leading out of the apartment I lived in, with a window overlooking the city and an enormous spiderweb stretched across it—I confirmed it aloud as well.

“Excellent technique. You’ve been hiding real talent from me. When did you start?” he asked, turning the page to a study of a hand I had been working on, trying to draw it in different positions.

“I don’t remember. I was always doodling something, even before my parents’ accident and before you took me under your wing.”

“I can’t believe this escaped my attention,” he said, continuing to flip through the pages, this time looking at sketches focused on different elements of the face—eyes, mouths, ears, whole faces, and the different expressions people made. “I see you focused on the most important aspects,” he added.

Then he closed the sketchbook and put it into a drawer of his desk.

“I’ll look through everything more carefully later.”

“I understand,” I replied with a nod.

Meanwhile, he reached for a letter opener and cut open the bundle of money. He picked up the bills once and let them spread into a fan, then, without counting them, placed everything back on the desk.

“I’ll think about how we can use your talents in the future. We can’t allow them to go to waste,” he said.

And I felt something inside me crack. Ever since he had entered my life, he had always been the one deciding what I should train, how I should behave, what I should learn.

Art was the only thing I did entirely for myself.

And now, on the very day I had done something using the skills he had taught me, but entirely on my own initiative, my reward was having the one thing that truly belonged to me taken away.