They didn’t know until later where he came from. He might as well have materialized from thin air, but they knew the moment he stepped into the alley. The air was charged somehow, different, as if the individual molecules responded to his presence, vibrating visibly off his body.

The dumpster beside him vibrated, the only warning Justin had before it swept across the narrow alleyway, crushing the Guard between it and the building with a tremendous crack that had them all ducking into each other.

JC cried out in surprise, a thin, quavery cry that echoed off the back wall of the alley and back onto the street.

A Guard appeared in front of them from out of the darkness. “Stay here,” it said. The voice was a woman’s.

The noise brought the second Guard, who stared at the dumpster and the four dirty men huddled across from it, newly revealed in the light of the vehicle on the street.

“What happened here?” he asked the new Guard.

She shrugged.

“This them?” he asked.

Justin didn’t listen to their conversation anymore; he stared at her boots. He could barely see them in the light from the street, but they were marked, scratched, not regulation and not the boots of a Guard. Not a Guard.

He stared up at them just as the woman dressed as a Guard knocked the other into the wall beside them, hard enough to leave a dent in the brick. He crumpled to the pavement and didn’t move.

“Clear!” she said and two more figures appeared out of the darkness, one short and one much taller. The shorter one signed something to the taller one who nodded and moved on, approaching the body beside them. Justin scooted closer to Joey and JC as he began to strip the Guard of his uniform, carefully folding all that was salvageable.

The woman talked to the third man in low whispers. He never spoke, only moved his hands in a crude approximation of sign language. She pointed at them and Justin tried to lean closer to hear what she said, but her voice was too low and Joey poked him in the side and said, “There’s something familiar about that guy.”

Justin stared at him, trying to see what it was. He wore a helmet; it couldn’t be his face. He knew this one was the one they’d felt enter the alley; he could still feel the energy rolling off him in waves and there was something familiar about it…

JC whimpered suddenly and Justin looked down to him. “Justin, make it stop,” he said, almost ending on a yell and Justin covered his mouth, stroking his cheek as he looked up to the pretend Guards, wondering what they’d do.

She’d stopped talking and stared at them now. He did too, the short one. He stepped closer to them, crouched down in front of them and looked at them all in the light of the abandoned vehicle still on the street. He slowly reached up and unlatched his helmet, eased it slowly off his head.

And Justin knew him. A scar ran down the right side of his face, across his eyelid and down the curve of his jaw, but it was the same face he’d seen every day for ten years. Chris. It was Chris.