a Lashing Out at a Figure in Absentia. You are endangering others,
endangering aircraft and people and property below that. I insist that you
Right-Make this now, this instant."

"Yeah, uh-huh, yeah." And I squint up at my kite, the sun coming down behind it
now, and it's just a dot in the big orange fire. The wind's more biting than
friendly. I pull the foam sweater a little closer, and do up one of the buttons
in the middle.

"Maxes!" Linus shouts, his happiness dissipating. "You have thirty seconds to
get that down here, or I will Right-Make it myself."

I didn't live with my dad for twenty years without picking up some
Process-speak. "You seem to be Ego-Squeezing here, Lin. This Blame-Saying is a
Barrier to Joy, bud, and the mark of a Weekend Happyman. Why don't you go watch
some TV or something?"

He ignores me and makes a big show of flipping open his comm and starting a
timer running on it.

Man, my kite is a work of art. Megafun.

"Time's up, Feckless Filthy," Linus says, and snakes out and punches the suck
button on my monofilament reel. It whizzes and line starts disappearing into its
guts.

"You can't bring down a kite *that* way, frickface. It'll crash." Which it does,
losing all its airworthiness in one hot second and plummeting like a house.

It tears up some trees down Chestnut, and I hear a Rice Crispies bowl of
snap-crackle-pops from further away. I use a shear to clip the line and it zaps
away, like a hyperactive snake.

"Moron," I say to Linus. The good kiddies of Chestnut Ave are now trickling home
in twos and threes and looking at the gap in the smile with looks of such bovine
stupidity that I stalk away in disgust, leaving the reel bonded to the middle of
the road forever.

I build a little fort out of a couch and some cushions, slop fix bath over the
joints so they're permanent, and hide in it, shivering.

#

Tricky-treaters didn't come knocking on my pillow-fort last night. That's fine
by me. I slept well.

I rise with the sun and the dew and the aches of a cold night on a mattress of
clothes and towels.

I flip open my comm, and there's a half-doz clippings my agent's found in the
night. Five are about the bugouts; I ignore those. One is about the kite.

It crashed around Highway 7 and the 400 in Vaughan, bouncing and skidding.
Traffic was light, and though there were a few fender-benders, nothing serious
went down. The city dispatched a couple-three guys to go out with solvent