4

                “So uh…” I said awkwardly, meeting her eyes, “what do you think? Is she legit?”

                She seemed deep in her own head, contemplating it from all angles. “I think there’s really only two possibilities here, and they’re on opposite sides of the ‘how screwed we are’ spectrum. The first is that she’s bluffing. She made up her story about Hazel being a water bender, assumed you had electro-kinesis, and is trying to get control of your powers for her own benefit. Or maybe Hazel is a water bender, but she’s still under Moriah’s control.”

                “If that’s the case, then why did she give me the option to not talk to her?” I asked.

                “Either she’s really confident you’re going to go to her, or she has eyes on us, despite what she said. I wouldn’t be surprised if she found a way to force your hand and give in to her. Either way, I don’t think that’s the last time we’re going to be dealing with her.”

                I paranoidly looked around the roof of our apartment, trying to spot anything that could be taken as a hidden camera. “That’s not a comforting thought at all…” I turned back to her. “And the second possibility?”

                She shrugged. “That’s she’s telling the truth, I guess. That she’s not some government spy trying to recruit you for some program to protect the world and is just trying to look out for supernaturals because of her daughter.”

                I stayed silent, waiting for her to continue, but she just sat, lost in thought, leaving the room with an incredibly uncomfortable silence. “That’s it? What do we gain from trusting her then?”

                “Answers?” Lizzie replied uncertainly. “Confidants? Moral support and security? I don’t really know, she was kinda vague about the whole meeting thing. Which, by the way, I’m still kinda uncomfortable with.”

                “She seemed pretty confident that we were both talking about superpowers,” I thought aloud. “So why would she still be secretive about it? What does she have to lose from just outright asking me if I’ve picked up superpowers?”

                “If she was protected by the government, probably nothing. Even if you tried to expose her, chances are you would only seem crazy to people. She’d be heavily protected, and chances are Moriah wouldn’t be her real name. But if she’s telling the truth then… well, what she said earlier probably holds true. If the government were to find out about supernaturals, that puts her and her daughter in serious danger.”

                Silence followed, and our contemplative minds exercised themselves. Lizzie then got up and went over to my laptop. “Let’s try Googling her.”

                “Good idea,” I said, pulling my actual phone out from my pocket.

                Moriah’s social media presence was surprisingly bulky. She had a lot of different accounts; her LinkedIn detailed her journalism job in San Antonio, and her Facebook and Instagram were full of pictures and stories from her personal life. I saw several pictures of Hazel as well as a boy I’d never heard of. He looked far more like Moriah than Hazel did, and sure enough, a caption revealed that he was Moriah’s birth son. Cole Bentley—twenty-four, according to his socials—was a jock in every sense of the name. His posts were almost entirely about him playing basketball or football, hanging out with his friends at pubs or bars, and the occasional tweet frustrated at the San Antonio Spurs for blowing a game.

                Lizzie searched up Hazel to find a much quieter social media presence. She had her friends that she’d go on outings with, to things like bars and movies. A beach picture showed up on her timeline, and we both went to work on analyzing every detail of it, remembering Moriah’s beach analogy earlier. Obviously, we found no evidence of any kind of magic; Hazel would’ve been an idiot to have posted something so blatant about magic around Moriah. Frustratingly, there was no real association we could draw about Hazel and water magic from just her posts. She didn’t advertise herself as a swimmer, her posts weren’t focused on the beach, it was all extremely average. Lizzie instead shifted her search to seeing if there was any evidence Hazel had been treated poorly. Dead end there as well; None of them seemed to show her miserable or tired. She looked enthusiastic, bright, and sunny in all of them.

                We switched back to Moriah’s posts and found our biggest breakthrough. Hazel had been adopted out of New Jersey in 2012. Lizzie’s swift fingers ran across the keyboard to find any incidents in New Jersey in 2012, and immediately one thing stood out: Hurricane Sandy.

                “A water-based accident that took the lives of…” she ran another quick search, “two hundred people… Were Hazel’s parents a part of that?”

                “If Hazel survived mysteriously, that could be our clue,” I agreed.

                And sure enough, one more Google search for a “Mysterious survival from Hurricane Sandy” answered every last question we had. An article detailed a five-year-old Hazel Connors who’d somehow survived a flood that had destroyed her childhood home during the superstorm, one that also took the lives of both her parents. The kid had been rescued and had miraculously been healthy upon examination. The catch was that the rescue had been over a day after the flood. By all accounts, the kid shouldn’t have survived.

                The author of the article? Moriah Bentley.

                We then shifted our focus to Moriah’s article history. Anything that was local wound up being insipid news about San Antonio. The ones that stood out were the ones that she didn’t stay local for. She’d report on a plane crash in Iowa, where somehow half of the flight managed to survive. There was an article on a person who’d gone missing in Atlanta, seemingly disappearing out of thin air on a bus—what was revealed to be a hoax. There were plenty of articles on major disasters too, like one on Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey in addition to Sandy, several deadly tornados in the Midwest, the recent fires in California, and even the deadly earthquake in Haiti. But a common theme was present in her travelling articles: They all focused on some mystery that occurred during the event. A strange survival, a weird discrepancy, a mysterious disappearance, that sort of thing.

                We both took in the information slowly, trying to make heads or tails out of it. I turned to my inquisitive girlfriend and said “So… what’s the verdict from this?”

                Lizzie’s lips were parted. “Well… her claims track. Hazel has a connection with a freak storm with a mysterious survival, and I don’t think we have any doubt now that she’s our water bender. And… she doesn’t look troubled in her posts. The uploads…” she said, scrolling through the photos and reading the dates. “There’s nothing suspicious there that I can see. She doesn’t post often, but it’s certainly not regulated to any kind of schedule. Then there’s Cole, who… well, who knows what kind of involvement he has in any of this. But he seems to be a free man, able to play sports, and hang out with his friends frequently. If he’s in the know on this, he’s not getting kept secret.”

                “So, you think Moriah’s telling the truth?” I asked.

                “If she’s lying, she’s got a lot of evidence covering for her,” she said slowly. “But what bothers me most are those other articles. She’s not really hiding the fact that she’s hunting for supernaturals, even if she’s not outright saying it, which is surprising to me. You have to wonder what kind of deal she has at San Antonio if she’s permitted to cover these kinds of things. Meanwhile, if she were working for the government… I don’t know if she’d be this open about what she’s doing.”

                “Right,” I agreed, following my own train of thought. “If she didn’t want anyone suspicious of her, she’d just tell us she was a private journalist, and leave no trace of herself online. Like, there’s a hundred different ways she could keep herself out of the spotlight, but she’s not, for some reason.”

                Lizzie pulled up Moriah’s social medias again, and absentmindedly scrolled through post after post, picture after picture. “Man…”

                “What?” I asked.

                “It’s just…” she said, a bit softly. “I don’t know. The vibes I’m getting from these posts aren’t… threatening. It’s like… I really want to trust her. And I can’t really pin down why…”

                I nodded along mutually. Every time I looked through Moriah’s pictures, something just melted my heart. She’d proudly have a picture of herself at Cole’s college graduation, and Hazel would look on, an innocent smile lighting up the duo. There were plenty of pictures of Cole playing basketball or football and her just cheering him on. The comments were all supportive, and she frequently seemed gracious in the replies. There were several throwback posts of early Hazel moments, like when she celebrated birthdays in her tween years, and again, all the replies were so positive. I privately wondered if my own mother’s posts were anywhere this cheesy.

                It hit me suddenly what the vibes of Moriah’s posts were.

                Moriah was a mother.

                While her articles were all professional and business, anything related to her personal life showed her life’s accomplishments as a mother. She proudly supported her kids throughout their lives. They were her life and soul, and it really reflected in her posts.

                There was a moment from our phone call that had stood out. Toward the end, when I’d told her I might not choose to see her again, her tone had shifted. At first I’d been suspicious about it, but more than anything, it’d felt strangely familiar. It had a twinge of disappointment and a layer of nervousness added to it. Only now did I realize where I’d heard it before. This was the same kind of tone I’d heard from my own mother two weeks ago. Back when I told her I was going to propose to Lizzie, that I’d already had the ring, and that I’d love her support. She didn’t like my decision, but she finally relented, putting aside all her concerns to support me. It was a specific tone. One full of worry, full of protection, but also one of repression. Mom had forced her cares to the side to do something uncomfortable, and that was to trust me. And those same intonations were coming from Moriah. If I was interpreting it right, Moriah was scared about something. Whether it be me, Hazel, or something in between, she was scared. But she was doing something brave by trusting me to be careful, relenting to let me tackle the world by myself.

                I relayed my thoughts to Lizzie who quickly confirmed my thoughts. “Yeah, now that you mention it, that’s exactly the vibes I’m getting. She reminds me a lot of my own mom. Damn… If she’s playing us, she’s hitting us right in our heartstrings…”

                “You think she’s manipulating us?” I asked, unconvinced.

                She sighed. “I don’t know what to think. I’m confident we’re right about Hazel, but… I just can’t imagine her being abused or mistreated. The fact that Hazel endorsed Moriah personally as well is a good sign but… man this just feels too perfect.”

                I studied the photo on the laptop that was currently displayed, a simple photo of Moriah, Cole, and Hazel, and a man we’d learned was Moriah’s husband, just smiling on a photo. No occasion, just a post of the four of them titled “family” and a heart emoji. I clutched my chest, feeling the tug of my heartstrings and thinking of my own family. What was I going to do?

                “Here’s what I think…” I finally said. “I think that if she’s following me, then chances are I’m fucked as it is. No matter what I do, no matter what I say, she’d be there, one step ahead of me. So, while I could ignore her and have her follow me to the end of time… I could instead reach out to her and have some semblance of control. That might just mean talking to her directly and getting answers up front.”

                “You think?”

                I nodded with some hesitation. “At the end of the day, I’d rather be on the good side of my enemies than their bad side. If she really is as powerful as we fear, it might work to our benefit to appeal to her and get some agency ourselves. And if she really is just a mother of supernaturals… well, then I suppose we’d be making some incredible allies. So… I’m scared but… let’s meet up with her. See what this whole thing is about.”

                Lizzie nodded slowly. “That… that’s probably what we’ll have to do.”

                We shared an uncomfortable gaze before I pulled out the burner phone again. “I… I guess I’ll… give her a call.”

                “Oh, quick thing,” she suddenly added, holding a hand forward to stop me grabbing the phone. “I have a quick idea. Whatever day she suggests meeting, reject that and propose a time of your own.”

                “Why?” I asked confusedly.

                She smirked. “It’s a control thing. If she’s deciding the schedule, there could be some important reason why she wants you to meet her at that time. If you give her a counteroffer and she starts to squirm, we know that there’s something more under the surface.”

                I blinked a couple of times, following her logic very loosely. “Where’d you come up with that?” I joked uncomfortably.

                “It’s just something I yell at characters when reading fantasy novels sometimes,” she chuckled sheepishly. “Didn’t think I’d be living out that reality myself, but… hey, at least we can try now, right?”

                “I… I guess I can try that.”

                She gave me a quick side hug. “Whatever happens, I’m here for you. Now let’s make a big fucking mistake.”

                Her snark lightened the mood, and after a deep breath, I picked up the phone.