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Riley and Sam jump out of the plane at the same time, snapping their wings open to catch the wind. They glide smoothly through the air and scan the desert below. The enemy weapon shipments have been running out from these coordinates, so the outpost has to be close by.
“Look!” says Sam, pointing. “I found them. They’ve got a shipment heading out right now! We gotta stop it.”
“Ah!” says Riley as he trips over a stick. Over in the driveway, the car engine starts.
“Oh no!” shouts Sam. “You’ve been hit!”
Dad is standing in the driveway next to his SUV. Sam likes Lola better, but Pop said they’re meeting her in New York. “Come on, Sam,” Dad says. “Get in the car.”
“But Dad. Riley’s still dead.” Sam gestures toward him. He’s still lying facedown in the sand where he fell.
“Sam,” Dad says again. “We have to go.”
“It’s not fair,” Sam tells him.
“You knew we’d be leaving soon. If you weren’t prepared for someone to be dead when we left, you shouldn’t have played a dying game.”
Sam can feel the backs of his eyes getting all hot. “I have to save him.”
Dad just looks at Sam. He hates it when Sam talks back, but he doesn’t look angry now. He looks tired and kind of sad. “Okay. Well. Do it quick.”
“You can’t just save someone quick, Dad. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Well how long’s it gonna take? Five minutes?” Dad looks through the open car window at Pop, who nods. “We can do five minutes.”
Riley sits up. “You want me to be dead for five minutes?”
Sam thought heroically saving him would be very dramatic and exciting. Only probably not for the one who’s dead.
Sam thinks about it. “We can end on a cliffhanger,” he decides. He smiles a slow, sneaky smile, and looks at Dad out of the corners of his eyes. “And then I’ll have to come back to visit.”
Dad rolls his eyes. “I already told you we’ll visit sometime. Come on, get in,” he says. “We can drive Riley home.”
Riley tries to duck under Dad’s arm and into the car, but Dad puts a hand on his shoulder and makes him brush off the sand all down his front. Pop gets out to open the other door for Sam.
“Here,” says Pop, taking the towel Sam was using for his wings. “I’ll put this in your suitcase.” Riley hands over the towel he borrowed, and Pop takes that, too.
Sam spends the whole ride staring at Riley, all the way up til they’re parked in Riley’s driveway.
Sam’s eyes are all hot again. After Riley unbuckles, he reaches across the seat to hug Sam harder than he’s ever hugged him before. “Bye, Sam,” he whispers.
Pop is out in Riley’s driveway talking to his mom, and Dad comes into the back to grab Riley’s booster seat while they’re still hugging.
“I’ll come back and save you,” Sam tells him gravely. “I promise.”
***
The new house is smaller than their old one in the DC suburbs, because they’re in the actual city part of New York City. They have barely any front yard, and all the walls in the living room and the kitchen are bright yellow like the middle of a hard-boiled egg.
Sam hates it.
“I hate it,” Sam says.
“You haven’t even seen your room,” says Pop.
“Can we go home now?” asks Sam.
“This is home now,” says Dad gently, and Sam bursts into tears.
***
Sam is lying in his new bed without the sheets on, but Pop hasn’t even come in to tell him off about it. He can hear Dad and Pop downstairs, talking and moving all their furniture in from the truck. He tries to guess what they’re moving based off the sound it makes when it drags across the floor.
They don’t come into Sam’s room until it’s time for bed. Dad drags Sam’s big comfy armchair along behind him, and he sits Sam on his lap and tells him a story while Pop makes up the bed and interrupts to add things every once in a while.
Dad let Sam pick the story, so he chose his favorite one, about the time Dad brought Pop back to life.
Dad and Pop were in the war together for real.
Pop leaves to get them some groceries for the morning and Dad makes Sam brush his teeth and change into his PJs before he gives in and tells another story. They never let Sam have two stories. It’s only because he knows Sam won’t go to sleep til Pop comes back anyway, Dad tells him. Sam thinks he might be lying.
Pop comes back in right when the story’s ending.
“And that’s how your daddy put the ‘eye’ in Eiffel Tower,” Dad says with a grin. Sam’s pretty sure that story is fake.
Pop rolls his eyes. “Don’t tell him that, Nick.” He turns to Sam. “The Eiffel Tower has always been called the Eiffel Tower. There is no landmark in the world named after your dad.”
Dad looks at Sam like he’s telling a secret. “He’s just bitter. His hand story’s much more boring.”
“You always tell it wrong,” says Pop. Sam doesn’t think they’re allowed to tell it right. Whenever he asks, Dad says he lost his eye “overseas.” Pop says the same about his hand. Sam thinks that’s all they’re allowed to say.
Sam knows Pop isn’t really mad, even though he’s raising his eyebrows at Dad in his way that says look at yourself and hopes you’re as disappointed as he is. They both joke about it sometimes, about Dad’s eye and Pop’s hand, but Sam’s not allowed to, and neither is anyone else. He thinks it’s sort of like how Sam’s allowed to make fun of Riley, and Riley’s allowed to make fun of himself, but if anyone else did Sam would kick them in the shins.
Sam’s been trying not to think about Riley. Pop looks over at him, and he must see something in Sam’s face, because he says, “You can call Riley tomorrow. Tell him all about your new room.”
Sam just shrugs and presses his head harder into Dad’s shoulder.
Dad picks him up and swings him into bed like a sack of potatoes. It’s usually enough to make him feel better. He tries to smile.
Dad looks sad again.
While Dad’s leaning down to give Sam a hug, he says, “I know you think you’re gonna hate this place, but I don’t think you will. I heard a rumor they have panthers around here.”
Pop is giving Dad a look, but Dad goes to turn out the light and Pop leans down over the bed for his hug.
“Dad,” says Sam, “panthers live in the jungle.”
“Do you know what they call New York?”
“Hell?” asks Sam.
Pop snorts. Dad glares at both of them. “Don’t say that word,” Pop tells Sam.
“No,” says Dad. “They call it the concrete jungle.”
Sam considers this as Pop turns on his yellow nightlight.
They shut the door behind them when they leave. “Did you get it?” Dad asks Pop out in the hallway.
“We can’t just buy his happiness back,” says Pop.
“He’s six, Phil,” says Dad. “Of course we can.”
Sam has no idea what they’re talking about. He goes to sleep.
***
The next day, Sam gets to work.
“Why is there a full bowl of cereal on the floor?” asks Pop. He’s still in his pajamas.
“It’s bait.” Sam thought that was pretty obvious. Pop’s not a morning person, but he isn’t not a morning person, either. He’s kind of the same way no matter what time it is. Even when Sam wakes him and Dad up in the middle of the night after he has a bad dream and all Dad can do is grumble.
Pop’s still staring. “Is that a string hanging from the chandelier? How did you even get it up there?”
“It’s a panther trap,” Sam tells him proudly.
“Hmmm,” says Pop, staring down at the bowl of milk and cereal. “I heard panthers like pancakes.”
So Pop dumps the soggy cereal and makes pancakes. Dad wanted to make Sam eat the cereal and said something stern about wasting, but Pop poured it down the drain and said, “Oops…” while he flicked on the garbage disposal.
They put down two pancakes to bait the trap and eat the rest themselves. Dad and Pop both help make the trap better, so the pancakes are tied to the string which is tied to one of the big cardboard moving boxes that’s rigged to fall down so the panther can’t get away. Sam makes them poke holes in the top so it can breathe.
He watches the trap all day, but he doesn’t catch any panthers.
Dad says panthers only come out at night, but he won’t let Sam stay up. Sam worries about the pancakes getting moldy. No self-respecting panther wants moldy pancakes, and besides, Sam doesn’t want to accidentally poison it. Pop says the pancakes will be safe for one night.
Dad and Pop put him to bed but Sam can’t sleep. He keeps thinking about the panthers.
The light goes off in the big bedroom, and Sam waits until he can’t hear Dad and Pop talking or moving around anymore. Then he rolls out of bed, sneaks into the living room, and hides behind he couch to watch the trap.
Nothing happens. The moon shines in through the window and the trap’s shadow moves across the floor, but the trap doesn’t move at all.
Watching the trap is boring. It would be a lot more fun for The Amazing Falcon.
While Sam sneaks his way into the linen closet, he makes up the story in his head.
The Amazing Falcon is lying in wait behind a bunker on the secret enemy base, waiting for the super villain Absorbing Man to fall into his trap. There’s a commotion by the trap and suddenly everything erupts into chaos, but in the confusion The Amazing Falcon sees the trap snap shut. In the confusion, the enemy troops are firing at each other, and The Amazing Falcon has only to wait for them to finish each other off. He goes to make sure his nemesis has been caught, only to find a panther crouching in the shadows at the back of the cage.
Only that hasn’t happened yet. Sam’s just planning ahead.
In the linen closet, Sam sees the red and white towel he uses for his wings at the top of a big pile three shelves up.
Having crept into the enemy’s armory undetected, The Amazing Falcon spies the wings they stole from him sitting balanced at the very top of a high stack of weapons cases. Without his wings to lift him, the only way up is to climb. He knows if the stack falls, he’s risking death, or worse: discovery.
The stack wobbles only a little as he clears the first few boxes. He climbs higher and higher until the wings are in sight, no more than an arm’s length away. There! He snags the wings with the tips of his fingers, and barely manages to get a hold on them before the stack of towels—no. The stack of ammunition—collapses under his feet.
As soon as he hits the floor, the panther pounces.
Sam lands flat on his back while a mess of towels rains down around him, and the door opens fast behind him.
“Sam?” Pop asks, looking down at Sam from the closet door, the plate of pancakes in his birth hand. He has a birth hand the way Sam has birth parents—it’s the one he started out life with, but Dad and Pop get mad when people call it his real hand.
“Phil?” Dad calls from the other side of the house, louder and sharper-sounding.
“Everything’s fine,” Pop calls back without looking away from Sam.
“Why do you have the pancakes?” asks Sam.
Pop looks down at them like he’s surprised to see them there. He looks back at Sam, then at the panther on Sam’s chest. “We didn’t want to attract ants.”
“Look,” says Sam, poking the panther’s face.
“You caught a panther,” Pop observes.
“No,” says Sam. “He caught me.”
***
Sam gets in trouble for “sneaking all around the damn house in the middle of the night,” which he overheard Dad telling Pop through the wall, because it “scared the shit out of” him, and “what if Sam broke his neck?”
Sam thinks they’ve misjudged the thickness of New York City walls.
So now Sam’s stuck in his room, which is terrible, but they let him bring the panther. His name is T’Challa.
“I heard you were setting a trap for me,” T’Challa says, “so I set a trap for you.”
“That wasn’t for you,” says Sam, sitting across from T’Challa on the bed. “It was for The Evil Absorbing Man.”
“I know you’re lying,” T’Challa tells Sam.
“How?” he asks.
T’Challa gives him a look. “The Evil Absorbing Man doesn’t like pancakes.”
***
“Pop says moving isn’t the end of the world, but I’m pretty sure it is,” Sam tells T’Challa. They’re sharing Sam’s pillow, laid out in the bed because after the first half hour sitting got boring.
“Is it a Biblical Apocalypse,” T’Challa asks, licking his front paw, “or a zombie one?”
Sam thinks about when they went out for New York City Ice Cream because Dad and Pop were trying to bribe him and all the people on the sidewalk moved quickly in the same direction, staring fixedly ahead. “Zombie,” he decides. His window isn’t covered in frog guts. Plus, Dad and Pop let him leave his room ten minutes ago to get a drink, and the faucet didn’t run with blood. He’d put in the drain stopper and let it fill so T’Challa could have a drink, too, and then Sam had to blow on his nose for six minutes to help dry it.
No one likes a wet nose.
“Well,” says T’Challa, “your dads are downstairs. When the zombies invade, those suckers will never even make the stairs.”
“Yeah,” says Sam sagely, “they’d be the best in a zombie apocalypse. I wrote it down on my roster.” He goes to his suitcase and roots around until he pulls out two loose pages numbered carefully from one to three hundred and forty-nine. “They’re the two first picks for my fantasy team.”
***
They’re allowed to come back down when dinner is ready. They usually all make it together, but Sam guesses that’s part of his punishment.
He sure feels punished.
T’Challa says he can smell it twenty minutes before Sam catches his first whiff. When Pop calls up from the bottom of the stairs, they head down side-by-side to find Dad in the dining room while Pop’s in the kitchen making plates.
“Can T’Challa sit at the table?” Sam asks Dad.
Dad blinks once. “Who’s T’Challa?”
Sam looks over at T’Challa and says, “That’s a more complicated question than you think.”
Sam pushes T’Challa into the empty chair while Dad goes into the kitchen to help. Pop brings over three full plates and Dad brings three sets of silverware. Three of everything, and four of them.
“Where’s T’Challa’s food?”
Pop turns to look at Sam down the line of his arm while he’s setting down Sam’s plate. “Who’s T’Challa?”
“That’s a more complicated question than you think,” says Dad wisely.
“I am the rightful king of Wakanda,” says T’Challa.
“Well,” says Sam, “the Rightful King of Wakanda still needs to eat.”
“The rightful what of what now?” asks Dad, pausing with his chair pulled halfway out.
Pop says, “I thought you were The Amazing Falcon.”
Sam decides it would be best to cut right to the chase. “He needs sustenance.”
“Panthers don’t eat meatloaf,” says Dad. “Meatloaf is people food.”
“T’Challa is a person! He’s the king and protector of Wakanda!” Sam turns to look at T’Challa. “He’s stuck in his panther form. He changed in the heat of battle, and the witch he was battling put a spell on him to stop him changing back.”
They look at each other silently for a second, then turn back to Sam. “Ah,” says Pop.
Pop and Dad won’t give T’Challa any meatloaf, but they all let him lick their plates clean.
“Mmm,” says T’Challa. “Delicious.”