Chapter 240
The kitchen smelled like cumin and browning onions, and Kamala had her homework spread across the coffee table even though nobody had asked her to move it there. Eevee had claimed the good end of the couch an hour ago and hadn't budged since, tail curled over its own nose. Yusuf stood at the stove with his sleeves pushed up, stirring a pot that hissed every time he touched it, and from somewhere upstairs Muneeba was on the phone with someone from the mosque committee, her voice rising and falling in the register she used when she was being polite and losing patience at the same time.
Aamir dropped onto the couch next to Eevee, who opened one eye and closed it again.
"You're actually doing homework. On a Tuesday. Willingly."
"It's due tomorrow, genius."
"Everything's due tomorrow with you."
He nudged her foot with his.
"You want me to look at it, or is this a no-Aamir-I've-got-it situation."
"It's a you're-going-to-tell-me-I-did-the-math-wrong-and-then-be-right situation."
"That tracks."
Kamala's phone buzzed against the coffee table, one sharp rattle against the wood. Then it buzzed again before she'd even picked it up, and again, and then it just kept going, one notification stacking on top of the last so fast the screen couldn't keep up. Somewhere in her bag, Aamir's phone had started doing the same thing. So had the one charging in the kitchen, buzzing hard enough against the counter that it walked itself an inch toward the edge.
Kamala grabbed her phone off the table. Seventeen alerts, then twenty, red dots stacked past the point of being readable at a glance. She caught fragments as they scrolled past, something about a grid failure spreading across multiple cities and a compromised emergency channel, nothing that added up to one clean sentence.
"What is that."
Aamir was already looking over her shoulder, and Eevee had sat up fully now, ears back.
Muneeba came down the stairs still holding her own phone, her sentence to the mosque committee cut off mid-word.
"Kamala. Do you know what this is?"
"I don't know yet. I'm going to find out."
She was already moving toward the stairs, calling something back over her shoulder that wasn't really an answer.
"Two minutes, I promise."
She ducked into her room, pulled the door most of the way shut, and pulled up the Commlink without waiting for anyone to loop her in.
The channel was already a mess, three voices talking over each other, coordinates read out and then corrected. It took her a solid minute of listening to piece together that this wasn't one city. It was a dozen, all going dark in the same stretch of seconds, and nobody on the line was naming why.
She keyed in and asked for a deployment slot, expecting it to be close to a formality given how big this obviously was.
"Ms. Marvel, I need you holding Jersey City. Eyes on the feeds, not boots on the ground. Not yet."
Kamala's hand tightened around the Commlink.
"I can be wherever in ten minutes, Carol. You don't even know what this is yet."
"That's exactly why. I need someone I trust holding a city that isn't a target, and I need her to actually listen when I tell her to hold."
"That's not fair."
"It's not about fair. Hold the city, Kamala. You'll get your shot."
The line clicked over before she could get another word out.
She sat there a second with the Commlink still against her ear, then came back downstairs already reaching for something that wasn't the whole truth.
"They've got it handled. I'm just supposed to keep an eye on things here."
Muneeba's eyes didn't fully believe her, but she let it go, already turning back toward the kitchen to check on whatever Yusuf had left on the stove.
Suddenly a sound cut through the kitchen noise that didn't belong to it, low and mechanical, coming from somewhere above the street. Then a scream, real and close, nothing like the notification sounds still going off in her pocket.
Kamala got to the window as something with too many joints and no face hauled a man up off the sidewalk two houses down, his arms working uselessly against a grip that didn't care what he wanted.
She didn't stop to explain. Grabbing Aamir by the sleeve, she hauled him toward the back hallway and yelled for her parents to get down and away from the windows. Yusuf came out of the kitchen already moving, one hand finding Muneeba's arm, both of them ducking low without needing to be told twice. Eevee planted itself in front of the three of them, fur up, growling low at the front door.
Kamala didn't have time for the window and the old oak tree the way she usually did. She pulled her scarf on over her shoulders, stretched her legs long enough to take the two floors in one stride, and hit the backyard already running, Eevee streaking past her toward the side gate.
She came around the front of the house at a dead sprint, and the street was worse than the window had let on. Three drones she could count, maybe more further down, and people running in directions that weren't actually away from anything, because no direction on this block still counted as away.
The nearest drone swung toward her before she'd fully landed. She embiggened her fist and put it straight through the thing's midsection, and it dropped, sparking, into a parked car. A second one came in low from her left. Eevee hit it broadside, a full-body tackle that sent it spinning into the street, and it didn't get back up. A third peeled off toward a woman crouched behind a mailbox, and Kamala stretched her arm the length of the block to close her hand around the drone's leg before it could lift the woman clear off the ground.
She wrenched it down and put her boot through the casing, and the woman scrambled free, already running for the nearest open doorway.
"Go, go, I've got it."
Two more drones were already moving past her, further down the block, and she couldn't get to both. One was diving on someone stumbling across their own lawn, out in the open. The other was circling low over Mr. Okafor's porch, the man who'd been handing out extra candy on Eid since before she could walk, and he was already halfway to his front door. She had maybe three seconds to pick a direction, and every direction meant someone she wasn't reaching in time.
She went for the one in the open, betting Mr. Okafor had enough of a head start to make it inside. He didn't. She was still ten feet out when the second drone broke off early, and by the time she turned, it had him clear of the porch and climbing, his shape still twisting against its grip, too far to do anything about it.
The drones that were left peeled off all at once, done with whatever they'd come for, and the street went quiet except for someone crying two houses down and a car alarm nobody had bothered to turn off yet.
Aamir found her first, Eevee at her heel, both of them checking her over for anything worse than a torn sleeve. Muneeba's hands went to Kamala's face like she needed to confirm it herself, and Yusuf stood a step back, watching the street like it might start up again any second.
"Kamala."
Muneeba's voice cracked on the second word.
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm okay, Ammi. I'm okay."
Her eyes stayed on the empty stretch of roofline where the last drone had gone, and on the porch two doors down where Mr. Okafor should have been standing.
Back in her room, her phone was still sitting on the charger, holding an order to stay put and watch the feeds. She'd done exactly that, and it still hadn't been enough.
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