With the doors now open, I saw Sparrow’s vehicle - the Albatross - for the first time. It was, to put it plainly, unlike anything I had ever seen before.

  The Albatross was a large rectangular object that was the size of a semi truck. Rotating fans and angled jet engines decorated the exterior of the object, though I could immediately tell that those weren’t sufficient to lift the Albatross into the air. Thick battery packs and large cubes that looked like magnets lined the bottom of the vehicle. As I stepped closer to the Albatross, the temperature dropped considerably, prompting me to throw my leather jacket over my orange jumpsuit.

  Due to the low temperature, I suspected that the objects strapped to the bottom of the Albatross were superconductors, and it achieved locomotion through the Meissner Effect. It was like one of those Japanese bullet trains. At least, that was my first guess.

  Sparrow jumped into her vehicle, and we followed her inside. The interior of the Albatross resembled a military operation’s room where small teams of special forces soldiers would receive their briefings before a dangerous mission. The walls were lined with large screens bearing slowly-moving maps of New Kinsington or North America. The map of New Kinsington was marked with various diagrams, and the whole city was broken up into eight districts: O’Hare, Lakeview, Sutton, Lawndale, Bridgeport, Kenwood, Ashburn, and Roseland.

  The city was very different from what I remembered, but it bore certain striking similarities. Fuller Park was still there (or whatever it was called in this world), and it still served the purpose of dividing the city between the East Side and the West Side. Also, I recognized the districts’ names, though many of them seemed out of place to me. The O’Hare District encompassed all of the Far North, and Lawndale District had grown to encompass most of the West Side.

  Most notable of all was Sutton District. What had been the Loop just hours before now bore the name of Sebastian Sutton, Kingfisher. Naturally, that man had renamed the beating heart of Chicago after himself.

  “Great! Everything’s working!” Sparrow cried out in joy a moment before the cockpit was filled with the sound of spinning fans and burning engines.

  “Why wouldn’t it be working?” I asked.

  For future reference, I took my phone out of the bag and took a picture of the map of New Kinsington. At that same moment, Sparrow stepped into the crew compartment where Ryan and I were standing.

  “Hold on!” Sparrow shouted, and I froze in place. She pointed one glove hand at my phone. “How is your phone working?”

  I just shrugged.

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  “How did you manage to add a faraday cage to something so small?” Sparrow said, her eyes locked on my phone. A dangerous look was on her face as she walked toward me and reached out to grab the device in my hand.

  I knew a hyperfixation when I saw it. If Sparrow gained access to my phone, it would only be a matter of time until it was disassembled. I pulled my phone out of her grasp, interposing my body between her and my phone. She could probably physically overpower me with her mutant body, but I was betting that she wouldn’t be willing to do that.

  “Hey, hey!” I said, embarrassed by the sudden proximity with a woman’s body. Sparrow’s face came a few inches from my own, and I got a good look at the small part of her face that she kept uncovered.

  To my surprise, she looked like she was a year or two younger than me, probably the same age as Ganymede. Jesus, was every superhero in this town a damn teenager!?

  Based on the epicanthic folds on her eyes, I suspected that Sparrow was of Asian descent. Korean would be my first guess. There wasn’t much more I could glean from her appearance due to the concealment. Damn, I really wanted to get a better look at her.

  “Come on, I just want to see it,” Sparrow asked, and a part of me wanted to give her the phone.

  “I don’t know what’s special about it. It’s just a phone,” I said.

  “All unshielded batteries in the town were drained an hour ago, yet your device still holds charge. Plus, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. What’s that? An apple with a bite out of it? Is that a reference to the apple of Eden?”

  “I have amnesia, remember? I don’t know. This was in my pocket when I woke up,” I said, lying.

  “If you just give it to me, then…” Sparrow said.

  “What’s that?” Ryan said, cutting her off.

  Ryan pointed out the window at the torso of a gargantuan reptilian beast standing in the harbor. It had almost reached waist-level in the harbor, even though the water there would have to be several hundred feet deep.

  “That is the reason you two are out of prison right now,” Sparrow said, her attention drawn away from my phone. With her back turned, I hid it in one of my leather jacket’s pockets.

  “Excuse me?” Ryan asked rhetorically. “How are we supposed to deal with a kaiju?”

  “Kingfisher thinks our good friend Macro-Kinetic is a Level 3.” Without warning, Sparrow jumped back into the cockpit. “Buckle up quickly!”

  I dove into one of the six leather seats in the crew compartment and quickly fastened the crash harness over my shoulders. Before I had managed to clasp the last buckle, the Albatross jerked into the air. I looked out the window and saw that we were already more than a hundred feet up.

  “Here’s the plan!” Sparrow shouted over the rhythmic thrumming that ran through the Albatross. “We’re flying to Lakeview where we’ll land on a building with a good view of the harbor. From there, Macro-Kinetic will kill the kaiju.”

  “Is that right?” I asked, slightly annoyed that the plan had been decided without my input.

  “Don’t worry, Kingfisher will reward you generously for your contribution,” Sparrow said.

  “Respectfully, Kingfisher can shove it up his ass,” I said in the least respectful tone I could manage. Oh, that felt good.

  “You’re not going to do it?” Sparrow said with shock and disappointment in her voice.

  “Oh, I’ll do it, but not because Kingfisher told me to. I’ll do it to protect the city. Tell Kingfisher he can keep his blood money.”