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The phone was at six percent and Jean was trying not to think about it as a metaphor.
She'd been in the Jersey City library on Jersey Avenue for forty minutes. Four public outlets. Two were dead. A third sat behind a printer cart that hadn't moved since the building was last renovated. Jean had claimed the last beside a man watching a Korean drama on a tablet at full volume without headphones. Jean's charging cable - the third one since New York, because cheap cables developed internal fractures the way cheap motels developed leaks, inevitably and without warning - was producing exactly nothing. She'd tried three angles. She'd tried holding it steady. She'd had a brief, vivid fantasy about using telekinesis to fuse the wire at the contact point, which she didn't do, because the telekinesis was still unreliable enough that she'd probably set the outlet on fire and have to explain that to a librarian.
Five percent. The phone was a used Android she'd bought for twelve dollars at a pawn shop in New Brunswick after the flip phone's screen cracked. Same SIM, same number, same carrier. Cheaper than replacing the flip phone and the only reason she could text without typing each letter three times on a number pad. She'd connected it to the library Wi-Fi because the phone had no data plan. Apparently that had turned on features she hadn't asked for.
Fourteen minds in the building. Jean let them run through like traffic noise. Two staff behind the desk, one bored, one irritated. A cluster of high schoolers doing homework with the kind of aggressive whispering that defeated the purpose. The Korean drama man. A woman reading to a toddler near the picture books, the child's attention bright and shapeless. Jean let it pass.
The airtime was the real problem. The twenty-dollar card she'd bought after leaving New York had come with sixty minutes. Then there had been the first call, the forty-seven-minute second call, and weeks of texts that cost more per message than she'd expected. She had maybe four minutes of voice left, and the service window expired in three days. After that the service would stop, and she didn't know how long the carrier would hold the number before reassigning it. The one Peter had answered twice. The only number he had for her.
She needed to reload before the service window expired, and she needed the phone alive to do it. The convenience store two blocks east sold prepaid cards, but the whole process required the phone to be on.
Jean pulled the dead cable from the wall and shoved it in her coat pocket. The oversized tan coat swallowed it. She pulled the hood down, checked the angle of the nearest camera by the entrance. Habit. Jersey City had fewer cameras than Manhattan, but Damage Control had operated here. Enhanced kids. Jean knew how that worked.
She walked to the front desk. "Do you have a phone charger I could borrow? Mine isn't working."
The woman behind the desk - mid-fifties, reading glasses on a beaded chain, name tag that said PATRICIA - looked at the cable, looked at Jean, and gave her the particular expression public employees reserved for problems that were not their problems.
"We don't lend chargers. We close at eight."
Jean could feel Patricia's irritation, flat and familiar, the kind that came from being asked for things that weren't part of the job. Behind the desk, a cable ran from Patricia's phone to the outlet beneath the counter, the connector visible where her purse sat open. Right there. Jean could ask again. Or she could skip the asking and go straight to the decision underneath, the place where Patricia would simply reach into her purse and hand it over and not remember choosing to. Four seconds. Nobody would notice.
"Okay," Jean said. "Thanks."
She walked back toward the outlets and sat in one of the hard plastic chairs near the windows. Her phone screen dimmed. She could see the last text thread, Peter's. Six days old.
That's not how you spell surveillance.
I stand by my spelling.
you shouldn't.
The chair next to her scraped against the floor.
A girl around her age sat down with a laptop bag, a phone, a charger, and a paper bag from a place called Ravi's that smelled like fries and something spiced. She had dark hair pulled back, a denim jacket with an enamel pin on the collar, and the energy of someone who had been doing six things at once all day and hadn't decided to stop.
"Oh, hey - is this outlet dead?" She was already reaching past Jean toward the working outlet. She noticed Jean's phone. "Is your phone dying?"
"It's fine."
"Because I have a cable. If yours is broken." She was already pulling a second cable from her bag. "USB-C. Is yours USB-C?"
Jean looked at the cable. Looked at her phone.
"You don't have to do that."
"It's literally a cable." The girl held it out. "I carry two because my brother borrows mine and then loses it in his room, like inside a shoe or something, which - anyway. It's a cable."
Jean took it.
She plugged in the phone. The screen lit up. The charging symbol appeared. She watched the battery tick from four to five percent like she was monitoring vital signs, which she wasn't going to think about too carefully because the last time she'd monitored vital signs she'd been keeping Peter Parker breathing while Frank drove him to Metro General, and her chest tightened anyway.
"I'm Kamala," the girl said. She'd opened her laptop and was unwrapping curly fries.
Jean almost didn't answer. The instinct was to keep it transactional. Cable borrowed, cable returned, no names.
"Jean."
"Cool. Do you go to school around here?"
"No. I'm passing through."
"Oh, nice. Jersey City's actually great if you know where to go. The waterfront's kind of touristy but there's this bakery on Newark Avenue that does these -" Kamala stopped herself, laughed. "Sorry. I do that. You literally just sat down and I'm already giving you a food tour."
"It's fine."
"It's a lot, is what it is." She pushed the fries toward the middle of the table. "Fry?"
Jean stared at the offered fries the way she stared at most kindness, which was with the faint suspicion that it would cost something.
"I'll bring the cable back," Jean said.
"It's a two-dollar cable."
"I'll bring it back anyway."
Kamala shrugged. "I'm usually here Tuesdays and Thursdays. After four." Then she put in her earbuds and turned to her laptop.
The phone hit twelve percent. Then fifteen.
Her phone buzzed.
Peter's number. Not a reply. Not a continuation of anything she'd started. A photo.
The photo loaded one stripe at a time on the cheap screen. Mister Business covered most of the bodega counter, one orange paw resting on a screwdriver beside something Peter had apparently agreed to repair. He looked like a building inspector who'd found a violation and was not going to discuss it further.
I need the screwdriver under him
Move him
He bit me last time
You tried to pet him first
He looked open to diplomacy
Jean typed two words and watched them sit in the text field. She knew what they'd meant the first time. She hit send.
Simple spider
The last time she'd used the words, she'd been wearing MJ's face and using Peter's hope against him. She'd meant predictable. Easy to hurt.
This time, he'd gone back to a cat that bit him.
That did not automatically make it hers to use.
The word Read appeared underneath.
Nothing.
Peter was miles away, well outside her range. She'd sent something that could hurt and now she had to wait for whatever he chose to give back.
The typing bubble appeared.
Vanished.
Came back.
wow
okay that one was earned
still rude though
Jean exhaled and looked down before Kamala could see her face. It wasn't forgiveness. It was three texts about a cat. She could leave it there.
She sat for another minute while the battery climbed. Then she thanked Kamala, who waved without removing her earbuds, and walked out.
The convenience store two blocks east had a wall of prepaid cards behind the counter. The clerk - twenties, Nets jersey, on his own phone - glanced at her when she walked in.
"I need a refill for this carrier. Cash."
He looked at the phone, looked at the wall. "System's updating. Can't process refills right now."
"When will it be back?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe tonight." He went back to his phone. "Try the place on Central."
Jean stood at the counter. The place on Central was a fifteen-minute walk in the wrong direction. If it was down too, she'd miss the bus she needed.
The clerk's mind was right there. Not buried, not locked. Surface-level information about whether the system was actually down or whether he just didn't feel like processing a cash refill. Whether Central was open. Whether there was a faster workaround.
Four seconds. No marks. No evidence. No bruise. The harmless ones were how she'd gotten good at the rest.
Jean's fingers pressed into her palms. She thought about the text exchange. She was a person who'd just had a normal, stupid conversation about a cat with someone who trusted this number would be there when he reached for it.
"I'll wait," she said.
She waited.
The system came back fourteen minutes later. The clerk processed the refill without comment. Jean paid twenty dollars for the card and three for a charging cable from the rack by the register, then punched in the code at the counter. The confirmation appeared. Another sixty minutes. The service window reset. The number stayed alive.
She did the math on the sidewalk. Twenty-three for the card and cable left her fifteen, and fifteen dollars had to cover food for the next three days. The bus she'd needed had left while she waited. The motel in Bayonne was four miles. The cold hit her face. She pulled her hood up and started walking.
She went back Thursday.
Not for the cable. She told herself it was for the cable. She'd borrowed something and she was returning it because that was what you did when you were trying to be a person who didn't take things from people without asking. The cable cost two dollars. The walk was four miles each way. The math did not support her reasoning.
Kamala was at the same table. Different bag from Ravi's. She looked up when Jean set the cable down.
"Oh hey! You came back."
"I said I would."
"People say that." Kamala took the cable and shoved it in her bag without inspecting it. "You didn't have to, though." She glanced at the empty chair. "Do you want to sit? I'm just doing calc, so literally anything else would be helping."
Jean sat.
Kamala talked. Not at her - around her, the way a river went around a rock. About her calc professor who graded like someone with a personal grudge against partial credit. About her brother losing a phone charger inside a boot, not a shoe, a boot. About the bakery she kept trying to recommend.
"Have you been yet? To Romero's?"
"No."
"You should go. Their guava pastry is - okay, I'm going to say life-changing and I know that's a lot but I'm standing by it."
"You stand by a lot of things."
"That's because I have strong opinions and I'm right about most of them."
Jean didn't say much beyond that. She didn't need to. It should have been exhausting. It wasn't.
"You're not from here, right?" Kamala asked.
"No."
"Where are you from?"
Jean had lived in a house, several foster homes, two psychiatric facilities, and then the streets. She'd spent the last six weeks sleeping in motels and buses and once, memorably, a twenty-four-hour laundromat in Edison where the dryers were warm enough to stay until dawn.
"Around," she said.
Kamala nodded like that was a completely normal answer. "Well, if you need food recs, I know like every cheap place in Jersey City. It's kind of my thing." She paused. "I mean, one of my things. I have several things. I'm a person with range."
Jean almost smiled. Let it happen.
"Tuesday," Jean said, standing up.
"What?"
"You said Tuesdays and Thursdays."
Kamala's face did something warm and completely unguarded. "Yeah. I'm here."
The following Tuesday, Jean showed up with a cable. Two weekend shifts at a loading dock in Kearny had replaced most of what she'd spent.
Not a two-dollar cable. A five-dollar cable from a discount store in Bayonne, which was the most expensive non-essential purchase she'd made that month. Kamala's cable was already fraying at the connector.
"Wait, you got me a cable?"
"Yours is dying. This is a replacement."
"This is actually nicer than my other ones." Kamala turned it over with honest delight. "Thank you."
"It's a cable," Jean said, and sat down.
Kamala described a group project where one member had done nothing, another had done everything wrong, and the third had dropped the class. Jean offered tactical advice about confrontation that Kamala received as normal study-group strategy and not what it actually was, which was a softened version of how Jean used to get hostile people to do what she wanted.
"Wait, that's actually good. Where did you learn that?"
"I had a lot of practice with people who didn't want to cooperate."
"See, that's the thing. You say stuff like that and I have no idea if you're joking."
"I'm not."
Kamala studied her for a second, then laughed. "Okay. I'll take it."
Jean took a fry from the bag on the table without being offered one. She didn't notice she'd done it until it was in her hand.
At eight, the library started closing. They walked out together. Kamala waved goodbye at the corner and turned toward her street, already texting someone, already moving through a world where giving strangers cables was just a Tuesday.
Jean stood on the sidewalk. The air was cold. The motel was four miles. She had exact change for the bus this time, because she'd planned for it, which was new - planning to come back to a place that wasn't a hiding spot or a route to something she needed.
Her phone rang.
Peter's name on the screen.
Jean let it ring once. The distance between being called and choosing to pick up.
"Hey."
"Hey." Not the crisis voice. Not the scan. Just him. "Bad time?"
"No."
"You sure? Because I can-"
"Peter. It's not a bad time."
A pause. She heard him exhale, settle.
"So," he said. "You're the one with the read receipts on."
"I didn't know they were on."
"They're on."
"I'll look into it."
"You will absolutely not look into it." She could hear the smile. "So, um, where are you? Broadly. City-level." A beat. "Okay, that sounded a bit like tracking - you don't have to answer that-"
"Jersey City."
"Whoa-okay. How's Jersey City?"
Jean looked at the corner where Kamala had disappeared. At the library's lit windows behind her.
"There's a library," she said. "And someone who lends cables to strangers without making it weird."
"You met someone."
"I found a person who gives me fries and talks about calculus. I don't know what that is yet."
"That sounds kind of like a friend."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying-"
"I know."
Peter was quiet for a second. Then: "Okay."
She stood on the sidewalk in December with the phone pressed to her ear and the collar of the tan coat turned up against the cold. A pipe knocked somewhere near him. Somebody's television bled faintly through a wall. Familiar sounds from a place she'd broken into once, been invited into later, and thought about more than she'd earned.
"I'm glad you called," she said. It came out plainer than she'd meant. She let it stand.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Me too."
A bus rounded the corner two blocks down. Hers. The one she'd planned for.
"My bus," she said.
"Go catch it."
The line went quiet. The bus pulled to the curb. The call log showed four minutes.
Jean put the phone in her pocket. Pulled her hood up. Got on.