Two weeks is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. But when you’re facing a deadline, two weeks can pass in the blink of an eye, and next thing you know, you’re staring down opposing counsel and readying yourself to win over a full jury of your peers. Happens all the time, really.

  … no? Just me? Oh, okay.

  Monday, January 25th arrived in short order, and thank goodness the dry cleaners had my favorite pantsuit ready for the first day of trial. It was an absolutely gorgeous shade of lavender purple that really brought out my eyes, and contrasted nicely with the gold-and-emerald barrette tying my hair up. Fatima’s own seafoam-green number was the only other real pop of color in the courtroom, and on our half of the aisle, that was by design. Julio wore black on black, practically dressed for a funeral. On the other side of the aisle sat the defense team; ‘opposing counsel’ or ‘our friends on the other side’, depending on how adversarial the proceedings were. Every attorney on their team, and all three attending representatives of the defendant corporations, wore some form of gray, navy, or deeper blue.

  None of them wore black.

  I risked a glance at the jury, on the off chance that their faces betrayed their opinions on our respective sartorial choices. I garnered a fair few looks, as was to be expected, but most of them drifted off of me and onto Julio. Or, if I was being more specific, the combination of what Julio wore and the object in front of him on our table. Two of our jurors, the retired black grandma and the forensic accountant, had very telling reactions: they first looked at Julio and then at opposing counsel before their expressions fell into deep frowns. My ears perked up when I noticed that, and I had to school my response back to just letting them pan across the courtroom as people filed in. The gallery only allowed another thirty or so people to spectate, as the first row was reserved for witnesses and other interested parties, such as the press, and it seemed to me that most of those seats were filling up.

  I’d told the rest of my team to sound the alarm and call in the big guns, yes. But I hadn’t expected quite this level of publicity!

  “With the jury seated, we are all set to begin.” Judge Friedman’s voice boomed in the courtroom, the microphone before him on the bench barely having to do any of the work. “At this time, would the plaintiff like to make an opening statement?”

  “We would, your Honor.” I stood from the table as I spoke. “Counsel requests permission to enter the well of the court and set up our pre-approved demonstratives.”

  “Counsel has leave to approach,” the judge said, then turned to his side. “Bailiff, if you would please ready the fire extinguisher?”

  The jury and the gallery practically erupted into murmurs at that, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek in an effort not to grin. My ears betrayed my excitement, though, swiveling to try and catch every last bit of murmured conversation passing between both the jury and the general public. However, as much as I would’ve loved to try and log every little bit of activity, we had a job to do. I nodded at Julio and Fatima, who both set about their own parts of the prep work.

  Julio picked up a trio of cylindrical fabric bags and unzipped them, then quickly got to extending the legs of a trio of easels and setting them up at an angle, facing the jury while also affording the gallery some measure of visibility. We’d discussed the angle in advance, and even practiced the exact setup in our firm’s moot courtroom so that it didn’t take forever. Fatima followed up by pulling out a trio of large photographs, each one held in an opaque plastic sleeve, and placed each of them onto an easel once Julio finished setting them up. The plastic sleeves had their opening at the bottoms and just enough room at the top for me to pinch the top and pull them off in one smooth motion.

  Two minutes after the pair stood up, they sat back down, leaving me alone in the well of the court. I stepped in front of the three covered photographs, and faced the jury.

  “Members of the jury, good morning,” I began, standing directly before them. I kept my hands loosely clasped before me, leaving only a few fingers free to gesticulate. “My name is Naomi Ziegler, though some of you might once have known me as the NMR superhero Foxfire. Nowadays, though, I am an attorney, and I am here in that capacity today to represent the plaintiff, Mrs. Destiny Irene Banks. Also representing the plaintiff are Julio Cabrera and Fatima Osmani.”

  I gestured lightly back towards the table with both my ears and my fingers, and the jury thankfully followed my lead. Julio and Fatima both gave severe nods of greeting, then leaned back into their chairs to let attention fall off them.

  “Now, I know I said that my colleagues and I are here with the plaintiff, but… well?” I turned towards our table and the gallery, making a show of panning over the crowd. “The woman herself doesn’t appear to be here, does she? Hm?” I turned back towards the jury with a frown. “So, the plaintiff didn’t even bother to show up for her own lawsuit? That means we should dismiss our case and save everybody the time, no?”

  I raised one hand towards the gallery of the court, as if to solicit their opinions on the matter, and then turned towards the jury with that hand still raised in question. Some of them had adopted uncertain looks.

  The same two that I’d mentioned earlier, though, had their eyes set squarely on the object I’d left on our table.

  “The answer is no, we shouldn’t. Because the plaintiff is here.”

  I stalked back over to our table and picked up the vessel. It was a small lidded vase, about the size of a medium saucepan, black porcelain streaked with gold in the stylings of kintsugi. It hadn’t actually been broken and repaired, though. As much as there was beauty in that art, it wasn’t appropriate here. With the object in hand, I brought it back over to the jury box.

  “Two-and-a-half weeks ago, on the day I was supposed to be giving you these remarks, Destiny Irene Banks passed away,” I told them. “She died in a fire. This urn contains the ashes that remain. Believe me: she wanted to be here. She wanted to face you all, to see these proceedings, to hopefully receive the closure she so richly deserved. And so she will be here with us at the plaintiff’s table, where she should have been sitting all along, conspicuous in her absence, deafening in her silence.”

  I returned to our table and handed the urn to Julio, who dutifully set it in front of my own chair. Then I walked over to the easels, pinched the sleeve over the middle photograph, and pulled.

  It was a photograph of Destiny Banks, smiling down at something just out of frame.

  “Our case today is about many things,” I started saying, only turning to face the jury after I’d said that first bit. “It is a case about hardship.”

  I pulled the sleeve off of the second photograph: Jerome Banks, smiling down at his little brother.

  “It is a case about disregard for one’s fellow man.”

  I made my way over to the third photograph, and pulled its sleeve up and off. It drifted to the ground, revealing the third image in its absence: Elijah Banks, smiling up at his mother and older brother.

  “It is a case about inequality. But most of all?”

  I faced the jury now, and raised one hand, palm facing up.

  “It is a case about two things: greed… and fire.”

  Foxfire burst to life above my hand. The jurors jumped at the sudden use of my powers, the dancing and shifting flames reflected in wide eyes.

  “My client, Destiny Irene Banks, was the widow of Gunnery Sergeant Tyrone Banks, formerly of the United States Marine Corps. Despite what any of you might have hoped, the survivor’s benefits that his wife and children, Destiny, Jerome, and Elijah, received to honor his sacrifice… were woefully insufficient in this day and age. The pay and pension was barely enough to put a roof over their heads, at a building called the Hillside Courtyard. But this paltry sum, this pittance, was not enough to put food in their bellies, or clothes on their backs. Keep this in mind,” I said to the jury, punctuating my statement by flaring the foxfire in my hand. “We will come back to this later.”

  I tossed the foxfire up, letting it hang in the air as I turned around to face both the jury and the judge this time, my back to opposing counsel, and let the foxfire fall into my left hand.

  “To make ends’ meet, Destiny Banks took on two jobs: as a gas station clerk in the mornings, and as a waitress in the afternoons and on weekends. Neither of those jobs scheduled her for more than thirty hours a week, meaning that she was never eligible for benefits. No retirement savings. No commuter reimbursements. No health insurance. And most importantly, no paid time off.” My pacing brought me to the empty witness’s stand, and at that point, I turned around, passing the foxfire back to my right hand. “This meant that Destiny couldn’t take the week between Christmas and New Years’ to spend time with her children. So many of us show our love for family by being with them for the holidays. Destiny, meanwhile, had to show her love for her children in a different way. She showed her love by being away from them, putting her nose to the grindstone to give them a chance at the lives they deserved.

  “And it was because of this sacrifice that Destiny was not there for her children when their apartment building caught fire and burned to the ground.”

  I raised the ball of foxfire in my hand, then tossed it lazily towards the trio of photographs. It split into two in midair, one half arcing towards the picture of Elijah, the other towards Jerome’s photo.

  The photographs caught fire when the halves struck, purple flames eating hungrily at the chemically treated paper.

  “Destiny, Elijah, and Jerome Banks lived in an apartment building called the Hillside Courtyard, in Southeast DC. At 3:28 in the afternoon on December 27, 2019, the Hillside Courtyard’s fire alarm went off, and the DC Fire Department sent a trio of fire engines en route. By the time they arrived at 3:41pm, the second floor was entirely aflame. At 4:07pm, the emergency Moonshot responder on duty, Barricade, arrived on the scene. Barricade will soon be sitting on the stand behind me.”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  I gestured behind me at the witness’s seat with a tilt of my chin and ears.

  “And when he does, he will tell you that, before he ever arrived, the stairs past the second floor had collapsed. That the fire escapes on the sides of the building were gone, melted into scrap and slag. That the building was falling apart so badly that firefighters couldn’t even lean a fucking ladder against its walls. That Barricade had to use his powers to ascend the building, and he couldn’t secure a landing position for Fire Rescue because the rooftop literally couldn’t support his weight for even one measly footstep. How one man had to stand there, walk into the fire alone, and somehow save three whole floors’ worth of people. All because the building was in such horrendous condition, such blatant disrepair, such an utterly dismal state that for anyone without literal superpowers, it was a goddamn deathtrap.”

  I cast a glance at the pictures of Jerome and Elijah, noting that they’d both been reduced to ash. The violet embers pulled away from the paintings with a negligent wave of my hand, and coalesced back into the tiniest flickering spark, which I gently cradled within my hand.

  “You will also hear from the DC Fire Department’s arson investigator, who will explain that the fire most likely started in the electrical room at the apartment complex. He will detail the expertise and training that allowed him to make that call, and walk you through his thought process, eventually guiding you to the realization that this fire wasn’t so much an ‘if’ as a ‘when’. You will also hear from one John Scott, one of the most experienced electricians in Washington DC, whose expertise is renowned in his profession. He will show you what correct wiring looks like, then demonstrate the kind of wiring that will inevitably degrade enough to set itself and everything else around it on fire.

  “Now, you may have a question after hearing that. Namely: if this kind of bad wiring will eventually cause problems, how was it left alone? Well, to answer that, you’ll hear from Miguel Arroyo, a building inspector with the DC Housing Authority.” I nodded towards the man where he sat in the gallery, a funerary urn similarly clutched in his hands. “He will tell you about how he was supposed to inspect the Hillside Courtyard thoroughly enough that he would have eventually discovered the faulty wiring, and suspended the building’s habitability until it was fixed. He will tell you that if he had done that here, like he has for several buildings in the past, it would have been completely vacant for at least two years, possibly up to five. And then he will tell you that, for the last ten years, he did not even perform the inspection for the Hillside Courtyard, or any of twelve other properties in DC, simply signing off on the certificates as though he had. Why?

  “Because he knew that if he didn’t sign off on them, the property manager would evict his sister and nieces who lived in a building owned, run, and built by the same three companies as our defendants. And trust me when I say that this was no empty threat.”

  Mr. Arroyo, as I’d requested he do beforehand, raised the urn in his hands so that everybody else in the courtroom could see it.

  “Mr. Arroyo is currently carrying an urn,” I continued. “That urn contains the remains of the same sister whose housing was used as a threat to ensure Mr. Arroyo’s compliance. She perished saving her daughters from the same fire that killed Destiny Irene Banks.”

  The small wisp of foxfire in my hands drifted over to the picture of Destiny Banks, and ever so gently set it aflame. My client’s face burned away first, the purple flame eating away at the paper until nothing was left but ashes. I closed my hand into a fist, extinguishing the foxfire, and turned to face the jury.

  “Now, recall how I mentioned that even Gunnery Sergeant Banks’ survivor’s benefits were barely enough to afford rent. Destiny Banks received assistance through what’s known as Section 8, a type of government subsidy to help provide housing for those in need. The way this usually works is that recipients of Section 8 vouchers only have to pay around a third of their gross monthly income in rent — that’s the pre-tax amount, by the way.”

  I walked over to counsel’s table and extended a hand. Julio placed a portable whiteboard directly into my waiting grasp. I brought it over to the three ash-covered easels and set it down on the middle one, then pulled a magnetically attached marker off the board and uncapped it.

  “Now, Destiny Banks worked two minimum-wage jobs, with the goal of hitting around fifty hours a week, but often falling a bit short. With some basic math, that means her gross annual income was still under twenty thousand dollars,” I said, writing the numbers out on the board and standing aside so the jury could see it. “Survivor benefits pushed that up to a bit under thirty thousand dollars. Divide by twelve, you get a bit over two thousand a month. Take a third of that, and… you know what?” I wrote in a different number than the math would suggest, then added a tilde next to it, the universal symbol for ‘screw it, I’m guesstimating’.

  “Let’s use some rounding to account for some excess here and there. At the end of the day, we get approximately seven hundred dollars a month as the maximum rent Mrs. Banks had to pay under Section 8. Now, Destiny Jerome and Elijah lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the Hillside Courtyard. They paid roughly seven hundred dollars in rent.” I capped the pen, held it by the cap, and tapped the base on my chin. “But you know… this leaves us with a question.”

  I uncapped the pen with a squeak, and wrote “§8” on the little whiteboard.

  “If Destiny paid seven hundred dollars for her portion, how much did your taxpayer dollars pay to make up the difference?”

  Below the “§8”, I wrote another, very specific number.

  “Section 8 has a maximum amount it is allowed to disburse,” I said, turning to show $2,975 to the jury. “This is known as the payment standard, and that number varies depending on bedroom count. Destiny and her sons lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and in 2019, the payment standard for those stood at just under three thousand dollars. Section 8 will disburse either this amount minus the renter’s contribution, or the rent minus the renter’s contribution, whichever is less.

  “Now, you are going to hear from one Mrs. Leslie King, whether she likes it or not.” I gave the jury a wicked grin, one that bared my supernaturally long canines for all to see. “Mrs. King was the property manager for the Hillside Courtyard and twelve other buildings. She’s the one who processed rent payments and submitted Section 8 vouchers to the government for reimbursement. And as much as she would rather not, she’ll let you know that for every single property she managed, each and every Section 8 reimbursement was exactly one dollar and ninety-seven cents below the payment standard.”

  I wrote that number on the board, $2,973.03, and circled it.

  “The apartment that Destiny Banks lived in, in the building that was guaranteed to burn down? That did burn down, so disastrously that the fire department had to rely on one superhero to do the jobs of twenty men? That killed Jerome and Elijah Banks?” I capped the marker and rapped it against the little whiteboard I had set on my easel. “That apartment’s rent was over thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  And then came the coup de grace, courtesy of the same absolutely brilliant showmanship that I’d have Fatima bringing on cross-examination: I reached over to the whiteboard, grabbed the little hook that the marker clipped into, and peeled.

  The whiteboard surface came off, the loose glue that had held it to the piece of cork board barely putting up a fight.

  “It’s like I told you at the start.”

  I held the whiteboard surface in one hand, the proof of corporate excess inscribed upon it carefully angled towards the jury and the gallery.

  “Jerome and Elijah Banks died because of two things. Greed.” I raised the whiteboard surface, then tossed it towards the plaintiff’s table. “And fire.”

  I turned on one heel, raised a hand towards the glue-covered corkboard, and unleashed a torrent of purple flame upon the cheap wood byproduct. Barely a second later, I closed my hand and pulled away, every single trace of the flame disappearing as I did.

  The cork board that remained was blackened and scorched. Two seconds passed, then a third.

  And on the fourth second, a chunk of carbonized sawdust fell to the courtroom floor, breaking apart into ash and dust.

  “We ask of you, the jury, to punish the people who let this happen in the only way they’ll understand,” I said, my voice breaking the stunned silence that had fallen over the courtroom. “They let people die for the sake of the almighty buck. So take it from them. Take from them every ashen dollar. Take away every bloody cent. Draw the line: here and no further.” I turned to face the jury once more, and briefly looked each of them in the eye, one by one.

  “The dead deserve that much.”

  With that, I walked back to the plaintiffs’ table, and sat down.

  Nobody spoke. For five seconds, seven, ten, the silence stretched.

  And then Judge Friedman cleared his throat.

  “The court will take a ten minute… actually, no,” he said, interrupting himself. “We will take a longer recess. Defendants, please take this time to decide amongst each other whether you shall be giving joint or separate statements. Know, however, that whichever option you choose shall apply to both your opening statements and your closing arguments.”

  I glanced across the aisle, and out of the corner of my eye I saw two of the defendants’ attorneys perk up ever so slightly, while a third seemed to wilt. Without giving them a proper look, though, I hadn’t been able to tell who was the odd man out. But, I realized as I heard my phone vibrate on the table and glanced down at its screen, someone had.

  “Trial shall continue at one-thirty this afternoon.” Judge Friedman banged his gavel and stood from the bench, a motion from the bailiff prompting us all to join him. I took the opportunity to subtly check my phone and read Casey’s text message.

  pinstripes

  K’s atty

  I blinked, then looked across the aisle at the defense’s table. Combover was WCS&Co.’s lead attorney, and if Casey was correct, that meant Gray Pinstripes was lead attorney for the contractor responsible for the building’s construction. This left Navy Blue representing the property management firm, which… hm.

  I nodded to Julio and Fatima, who gathered up their personal things, but left behind everything we’d need for the case. My purse went over my shoulder, and I shot off a quick text telling Casey where to meet us before tossing my phone in there too. We had about two hours until the case started back up, two hours to take this little nugget of information we’d learned, this indication of where the cracks had started to show, and see how we could apply it. Wedge the parties apart, have them claw and scrape for any little thread of logic they could spin into a rope for their codefendants. Divide and conquer, in the original sense of the phrase.

  And maybe, just maybe, our client’s killer would out themself for the court to see.