Kit had saved her the crispiest chips.
They were cold now. He held the paper bag open between his knees while Dara peeled off her gloves, and the smell of vinegar came up into the photo booth. Above the screen, a cartoon couple instructed them to MAKE A MEMORY.
"You don't have to eat," Kit said.
"I know."
He put the bag on the little shelf beside the coin slot. Then he took her gloves, folded them together and balanced them on top. Dara watched him tuck in the fingers. He had done that on the bus last week, when she fell asleep against him and dropped one down the back of the seat.
Outside the curtain, someone called for a stretcher. Not the one by the jeweller's. Another one. Dara looked at the gap Kit had left open, the strip of food court with its overturned yellow chairs.
"They told us to stay where they could see us."
He pulled the curtain back another few inches.
The booth was beside the shuttered pretzel place. They always came here after a date, even when they couldn't afford pictures. You could sit down and be together without someone lifting a phone. Sometimes they made faces at their reflection in the dead screen. Kit could cross one eye independently of the other. Dara had spent an entire Saturday trying to do it and given herself a headache.
Now the screen reflected the orange shoulders of her padded Racket jacket, his pale blue sleeve, the empty space between them. His mask was pushed up into his sandy hair. There was dust in his eyelashes.
Something scratched beneath her jacket collar. She reached for it, and Kit leaned closer.
"You've got grit back there. Let me."
"In a minute."
"Did you text your mum?" she asked.
"Yes. She'll meet us here."
They were meant to go to his house afterward. His mum had bought the horrible frozen pizzas Dara liked. They were meant to finish a film which Kit had definitely watched without her, though he kept denying it.
He looked toward the curtain. "The officer said she'll come over when she's done with the witnesses. I gave the medics my name. Told them it was me."
"You should've waited."
"For what?"
"For your mum. Before a statement. That's what we're supposed to do."
"It's only my name. I know they could arrest me. I'll tell the officer the rest when Mum gets here."
Dara rubbed the grooves the gloves had left around her fingers. She had been allowed to stand by the stretcher for a moment. The medic had said she was sorry. Dara had said, "No, he's Switchjack," as if that corrected anything, and the medic had repeated that she was sorry.
"Did the hold go wrong?"
Kit turned toward her.
"Were you watching me too?" she said. "When I took that girl out. Is that when it happened?"
"It didn't go wrong."
She waited. Somewhere behind the curtain, a radio crackled into words and stopped.
"Then what happened?"
He was looking straight at her. She wanted him to look away so she could stop looking too.
"I made him stop. All of him."
Dara's thumb kept moving across her finger. Back and forth, over the same groove.
Four years ago, when they were thirteen, they had sat on folding chairs in a training room while a doctor went through what their powers could do to a person. They had been given juice afterward. Kit had swapped his apple for her orange. Nobody had hidden this from her. Stillness could kill. A blow through living flesh could kill. They knew.
"By accident."
It came out as an instruction.
"No," he said.
She stood too fast and struck her shoulder against the booth wall. Kit half rose. She put out a hand and he sat back down.
"Don't."
"Okay."
There was nowhere to stand. Her boots took up nearly all the floor. She could walk out past the curtain, but then she would be in the food court where everybody could see her, and she wasn't ready to be there.
"He wasn't doing anything anymore."
"I know."
"You had him."
"I know, Dara."
"Stop saying that."
He pressed his palms together between his knees.
She had left them by the jeweller's, Switchjack motionless on the tiles, Kit watching him. Switchjack's fingers had been caught halfway through the little walking gesture he used to move people. Kit had stopped those fingers and her hand together. She remembered the terrible pause with her palm against a support column, the force building in it, strangers underneath the ceiling she was being made to bring down. Then Kit had said her name. Her hand had become hers again.
She had shoved the frightened girl through an emergency door. She had gone back for the girl's dad. She had shouted because people wouldn't move. By the time she returned, Kit was kneeling beside Switchjack, saying something Dara couldn't hear.
"The capture van was coming."
"I could hear it."
"So you could have waited."
"Yes."
She wanted another word after it. But, or except, or something that would change the shape of what he had admitted. Kit's face was pale beneath the dust, and his mouth was still his mouth, the crooked bit at one corner where he smiled first.
"Why would you do that?"
He looked down at his hands. "I was going to wait. Then I thought about him getting out."
"You don't know."
"He got out of North House. He got out of the other place."
"They were changing the cells. They told us."
"They told us last time too."
She lowered herself onto the bench, as far from him as she could get. It wasn't far. The seam on his trouser leg almost touched hers.
"You can't just decide they're going to fail."
"It's not just them failing. It's who he finds when they do."
His voice stayed quiet. She had liked that about him. She had liked how he waited when she got tangled in a story, how he never stepped into the gap to finish it for her.
Now she wanted him to shout. Then she could shout back without hearing herself be the only one.
"You killed someone, Kit."
"I know."
"A person."
"I know he was a person."
"Then why are you talking about him like a door you finally got shut?"
His head came up. "That's not what I'm doing."
"You're saying it worked."
"It did."
She turned toward the curtain. The bag on the shelf crackled as one of her gloves slid off it. Kit caught the glove before it fell. Without thinking, without looking pleased with himself, he caught it.
"He won't get to you again," he said.
Her stomach dropped. For one clean instant she was glad. No fingers moving at the edge of a crowd. No waking up with her hand clenched around something and having to open it, prove she could open it. No more videos of her smiling while he made her hurt.
Then she looked at Kit holding the glove.
"Don't say that like it's a present."
"I didn't mean it like that."
"You can't put it on me."
"I'm not."
"You just did."
He put her glove beside its mate. He was careful about it. She hated how careful he was being and hated herself for wanting his hands to shake.
"There were other people," he said. "That girl's dad. Milla from school. The guards he took with him last time. I'm not saying it was only you."
"But you're saying me."
"Yes. I was there. I saw your hand."
"It wasn't my hand."
"I know."
"You don't. You think you know because you saw it."
She had been wearing the same jacket when she broke the school's trophy case. The photograph had been in three papers: RACKET'S LATEST SMASH HIT. It had come back out when she broke a shopfront getting somebody away from a fire, and again when she tore the roof off an occupied car. There was always the school photograph beside the new one, so you knew what kind of girl you were looking at.
That afternoon at school, the deputy head had said she couldn't go on the excursion with three weeks of work missing. Dara had said half those absences were rescues. He had said half was not all. She had come out of his office and put her fist through the glass case in the corridor.
Kit had held her wrist, but the pulse had already gone through. A corner of glass had caught him above the eye. He'd needed glue at the clinic. She had apologized over and over, bought him sweets, done his share of their assignment. Eventually he had laughed at something and she had let that mean they were all right.
The little white mark was visible now. His mask never quite covered it.
"I don't kill people," she said.
"I didn't say you did."
"I won't. Not him either."
Kit rubbed at the edge of his mask. "I thought you'd understand."
"Because I smash things?"
"No."
"Because I'm the mad one?"
"Because you know what he's like."
She had heard the first two answers he hadn't given anyway. She wanted to keep hitting them. It would be easier than the one he had.
"I do know. I wanted you to hold him until they got here. I wanted him locked up."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes."
"And next time?"
"There doesn't have to be a next time."
He closed his eyes briefly. She could see him choosing what to say, the same way he chose which bit of bad news to give her first when somebody had posted something. Usually she let him.
"I don't want to keep meeting the next people," he said.
She couldn't answer that. She wanted him to have said something stupid.
"Neither do I."
He looked at her, waiting for an answer she didn't have.
"That doesn't mean you get to kill him."
The words came out too loud. A woman passing the booth paused, saw their masks, then kept going. Dara couldn't tell whether she had heard.
Kit shifted away from the gap in the curtain.
"I'm sorry," Dara said, and then, furious, "Not about that. I'm not sorry about that."
"I didn't ask you to be."
"You look like I kicked you."
He looked at her for a long time. There had never been a silence between them this long when neither was doing something else.
"I didn't think it would be easy to tell you," he said. "I thought after I told you, you'd still want to sit by me."
She was sitting by him. He knew that wasn't what he meant; so did she. She pulled her jacket sleeve over her bare hand, something to do instead of letting him see it curl into a fist.
"Promise me you won't do it again."
He didn't answer.
"Kit."
"I heard you."
"So say it."
He looked toward the food court. She could hear a cleaner trying to move chairs out of the ambulance crew's way, telling somebody she could manage, really, if they'd just let her lift it.
"I won't wreck anything," Dara said. "Like at school. I know that was horrible. I won't do it anymore, and you won't do this, and we can just..."
She stopped. Kit's expression had changed.
"Please don't," he said.
"I'm trying."
"You promised after school. You promised before that too."
"This is different."
"It always is."
She stared at him. He pressed his lips together, too late.
"That's what you think?"
"I didn't mean always."
"Yes, you did."
"Sometimes you say it's different and I still have to get in the way."
She looked at the white mark above his eye. He hadn't pointed at it. She would almost have preferred if he had.
"You should've told me," she said.
"I did. At the clinic."
He had. He had said he couldn't do that every time, and she had been crying, and she had told him she knew. Then she'd been so happy when he'd put his arm around her.
She pulled her sleeve further over her hand.
"I don't get to do it again," she said. "I know. I don't get to keep being horrible because you stay. But you can't use it for this."
"I'm not trying to."
"You are. Maybe you don't mean to, but you are."
He leaned back against the booth wall. His mask slipped forward; he took it off and held it in his lap. Underneath, his forehead looked much younger.
"Are you going to promise?" she asked.
"I can't promise I'll never."
She had imagined him saying it reluctantly. She had imagined believing him because she needed to. She hadn't let herself imagine this.
"If there's someone else," he said, "and it's happening again. I can't say I'll just keep doing what we did before."
"You can stop someone without killing them. You did. Tonight."
"You asked me about never."
"You're making up a worse one so you don't have to promise about this one."
He shook his head, but he didn't answer. Outside, the cleaner succeeded in moving a chair. Its metal legs scraped across the tiles.
Dara took her phone out. Her fingers wouldn't unlock it. She pressed her thumb too hard, then tried again.
"What are you doing?"
"Calling my mum."
"My mum can take us."
"I want mine."
He nodded. She looked down at the screen, at her own name on a message from home asking what time she would be back. There was a little dancing cat after the question. Her mother had recently learned how to send them and was using them for everything.
"Dara."
She waited with her thumb above the call button.
"Aren't you glad?"
She looked at him.
"That he can't anymore," Kit said. "Please. You don't have to say anything else. Just that."
His eyes had gone wet. This was the moment she would usually move closer. He wouldn't ask twice. She would put her shoulder against his, and he would tip his head down until their foreheads met, and there would be somewhere to begin again.
Her own eyes hurt. It was cruel to let him sit there asking. It was cruel of him to ask.
"Yes," she said.
He breathed out.
"Don't do that," Dara said.
His mouth closed.
"I'm glad he can't make me do things. I'm glad I don't have to be scared of him. I hate that I'm glad he's dead. Is that enough?"
"I wasn't trying to make you say that."
"I don't know what you were trying to make me say."
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He looked embarrassed, then angry with himself for looking embarrassed. Dara knew all those small changes. She knew him. That was what she couldn't get past.
Her mother answered on the second ring.
"Hi. Were the pizzas good?"
Dara tried to say Mum. Nothing happened. She took a breath which caught halfway, and Kit moved toward her before he remembered.
"Dara?"
"Can you come get me?"
Her mother stopped asking about pizza.
Dara gave the shopping centre's name, the entrance the responders were using. She said she wasn't hurt. She had to say it twice. No, she didn't need the hospital. Yes, Kit was here. No, he couldn't bring her home.
"I'll come inside," her mother said. "Stay with the medics. I'll find you."
When the call ended, Dara held the phone against her jacket. Through the open part of the curtain, she could see an officer talking to a man wrapped in a silver blanket. Soon it would be their turn. She would say what she had seen. Kit would say what he had done. There wasn't a version of this that could be finished inside the booth.
He reached for the bag of chips and stopped with his hand halfway there.
"Do you want me to go out?" he asked.
She didn't know. She wanted him gone and she wanted him to have been here all along doing something else, complaining about the film or saving her chips, anything she could understand how to answer.
"Don't touch me," she said.
His hand came back to his knee. "Okay."
That was all. He didn't say he hadn't been going to. He didn't try to make it a different request.
They sat with the curtain open. Her mother would have to come past the pretzel place, and Dara watched that end of the food court. Kit watched the officer.
After a while, Dara took a glove from the shelf. She started pushing her fingers into it, then stopped. The grit beneath her collar was scratching again.
She reached behind herself. Her fingers caught the collar, the mask strap, her hair. She couldn't find it.
Kit saw what she was trying to do. His hand stayed on his knee.
Dara kept trying until she got the grit out.