Authors: Robert J. Crane
I had it like Atlas had the world, the weight of it slowly being taken up as I started to gradually turn gravity on again. I was taking the heat in across the entire surface of my body, burning up the third set of clothing I’d wasted today. Yeah. It was one of those kind of days. Barely dawn and I was about to end up naked again. It happens so often lately I don’t even mention it anymore, like when I got burned out of my clothes at Shafer’s house. Yeah. That fight was near naked. I’d left Shafer and Borosky on my balcony while they were still disoriented from the mind meld and put on clothes in speedy rush.
Anyway, at least there was some upside to not having cameras around.
I took up more of the meteor’s weight as it pushed me toward the lake below. I judged it to be less than five thousand feet below, but my perspective was kind of iffy since I was presently on the leading edge of a catastrophic event fast approaching a major U.S. city.
I pushed against the meteor and it pushed against me with gravity and momentum on its side. It hurt a lot, not gonna lie. I pushed back even harder, and felt something near my kidney explode. Tendons blew out in my neck. One of my arms shattered, and it cascaded down into my shoulder and snapped my collarbone.
My Wolfe powers held me together. Barely. You can always tell it’s getting bad when Wolfe starts to panic.
Little Doll …
“I got it,” I breathed, but in truth, I wasn’t sure I did. My body was trying to pull itself together, but it wasn’t exactly doing a bang-up job under the pressure.
You might have reached your limit on this one, Sienna
, Zack said.
Let it go!
Kappler advised, more emotional than I’d ever heard her.
Get out while you can!
“No,” I grunted as we slipped to within a thousand feet of Lake Michigan below. I fired a few rounds of Eve’s light nets into the meteor, doubtful they’d do any good but also fairly sure they wouldn’t do any harm. I didn’t feel any difference, but then I had a few tons resting on my neck by now, and I hadn’t even taken up the full weight of the thing just yet.
This is suicide
, Bjorn said, probably taking in my view of the lake and realizing that, yep, we were about to hit that, and still going awfully fast. Not a survival speed for a human, even absent the massive rock that was coming along for the ride.
“At least I brought something to mark my watery grave,” I said. I looked sidelong and saw the city of Chicago off to my left, in the far distance, towers sticking up into the sky, sunrise reflected shining orange against some of the buildings. It was like a beacon against the horizon. Children. Puppies. Charity workers.
All counting on me.
I arrested my downward momentum, taking up the full weight of the meteor on my shoulders, and boy, did I feel it. It broke my back, both shoulders, a dozen ribs (on each side), and it was my only good fortune was that I managed to heal them all before they became much more than fractures. My muscles strained, squealed, cried—actually, that might just have been me. There were tears of pure pain running down my face as my feet touched the water and halted with it around my ankles.
I stood there, a couple inches from walking on water with a few tons of weight on my shoulders and let my eyes dart about. I took a ragged breath, then another. The surface of Lake Michigan stretched for miles in every direction, and a cool breeze blew over my bare skin, which hurt just about everywhere. “Well, hell,” I said, and realized that the surface of the rock that was eating into my back was as cool as if it had just been plucked off the ground, “what do I do with this now?”
I was body conscious enough to make the flight back to Minneapolis with my skin on fire, having left the meteor on the bottom of Lake Michigan after easing it in so as to avoid any massive tidal waves. It wasn’t like I could just carry the damned thing off, after all, so I did the best I could with it. It’s not like I wanted it for a souvenir or something, a fine reminder of that time I saved Chicago. Nobody would believe me anyhow, and the press would probably report that I ripped the top off Everest or something just to show off.
By the time I’d slipped into my fourth change of clothes for the day that was now dawning properly, the knock sounded at my door that heralded another impending discussion that I probably didn’t want to have.
Of course, the knock hadn’t actually come at my door; it had come on the drywall just inside my door because I didn’t currently have a door. “Uh, come in,” I said, resigning myself to the likelihood that I was about to get a lecture from some quarter.
Quinton Zollers strolled into my apartment as though he didn’t have to just navigate over my kicked-in door, as though the place didn’t still stink to high heaven like someone had used it for a latrine. Which … they sort of had. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and he looked around like he hadn’t been in here just a few hours earlier and already seen the place in its current state of disrepair. “So …”
“That’s a lousy opener for someone who can read my mind,” I said as I put on my leather jacket. It wasn’t my favorite, because there was no way I was risking wearing something I actually liked on a day like today.
“Just because I can read your mind doesn’t mean I always know what to say.” His eyes ran over my kitchen. “Because sometimes you don’t even know what you want to hear.”
“You know what I
don’t
want to hear right now.” The jacket settled on my shoulders, more comfortable than the giant slab of space rock that had been on them only a few minutes earlier. “That’s a starting point, right?”
“You’re not in the mood for a challenge, I know.” He took a few more steps into the room and cocked his head at my dog, sleeping on the heating grate in the living room. “But, then, who enjoys being challenged?”
“I’ve got enough of those coming my way on any given day, let alone today,” I said, holstering a spare gun. I hadn’t even carried one earlier, when I’d done my various vengeful runnings around this morning. “But you’re right, I don’t like arguing with the people I know. Feels a little too much like what I get from every other quarter.”
“‘Our critics are our friends, they show us our faults,’” he said, looking at me with a reserved amusement that would have made me want to kill anyone else I saw wearing the expression.
“Then I’ve got a shit-ton of friends.”
“No, you actually don’t, by any other standard,” he said, jabbing me for the first time in a long damned time.
“Thanks for the reminder,” I sniped back.
“At this point, a lot of people consider you invulnerable, power-wise,” he said as I started past him. “Yet you’re one of the most wounded people I’ve ever met.”
I stopped, showing him nothing but my back. “I wasn’t always invulnerable, and you know it.”
“And now you never let yourself be vulnerable in any way.”
“The last time I did,” I said, turning around to look at him with one of those dangerous looks I usually reserved for others, “you know what happened.”
“You trusted, Winter betrayed you,” he said, “I get that. You’ve got history.”
“Yeah,” I said, smirking because I didn’t want to let him see how I was really feeling. Not that I could hide it from him, but still, I didn’t want to feel exposed. That’s why I put on clothes, after all. “You know I didn’t quite grow up in the cupboard under the stairs on Privet Drive, but …” I paused, thinking about it. “Actually, maybe I had it worse.”
“You keep talking about your history,” Zollers said, “but I’m here to talk about your destiny.”
“My destiny at the moment involves finding more people to hammer into the ground,” I said, adjusting the leather coat around my shoulders. It felt damned uncomfortable after flying with flaming skin for a while.
“You begged me to stay here,” Zollers said, bringing me up short. “Why?”
“You know why,” I said, and I could tell my face was ashen.
“I am rather calloused to pain,” he said, and he took a couple steps toward me, looking at his feet all the while. “I have walls. Defenses. It’s a natural thing to develop when the thoughts of others start breaking into your own in your teenage years, when you don’t even know who you are yet. The struggles of others … now, that’s pain. Pain funneled right into the center of you. A six-lane freeway of raw, bare nerves.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with pain,” I said.
“Of course you are,” he said. “You’ve been feeling it on a near-constant basis since before then. Not that of others, though, just your own significant amounts of it.”
“I know you’re coming to a point here.”
“Why?” he asked, and now it was his turn to smirk slightly. “Do you have somewhere else to be, or do you just want to wander around beating up random strangers as you try to get a line on what to do next?” That took a little bit of my defiance away, and I knew he sensed it. “I feel your pain like no other, is my point. I get it. It’s unique on a level that I don’t experience much, but it’s also the same as that of everyone else.”
“So, what are you aiming for here?” I asked. “You want me to talk about it? How I feel after seeing my brother in the hospital, tubes coming out of him because of people who hate me? How I reacted to his girlfriend telling me she doesn’t blame me, when—I mean, hell, she damned well should.” I took a breath, and it felt hot in my skin. “You know how I feel about all of this, all of it, and—”
“I don’t, actually,” he said, staring me down. “Because sometimes, especially at a moment like this … you don’t know how you feel, either.”
“I know how I—” I paused right in the middle of my sentence, and tried to take inventory. I knew rage. Blinding, angry, yeah, that was there.
“That’s level one,” he agreed. “Like the icing on the cake, it’s something we can all see.”
“I’m sure the gooey center beneath has some more of the sugary same,” I quipped, not feeling that witty.
“You’re reacting,” he said. “You don’t know exactly what you’re going to do, you’re just flying like a missile, going after whatever heat source crosses your path. That’s dangerous, especially for you—”
“Because I’ve killed before?” I smiled bitterly.
“Because you’re the most powerful woman in the world,” he said, serious.
“Because I’m dangerous,” I said.
“You’re capable of it,” he agreed, though I could sense it was only partially. “But you’re also capable of good, like any other person. I think you should have seen that plainly after this morning.”
“This morning I burned down a house and dragged its occupants kicking and screaming to prison,” I said, and my shoulders slumped, “and I drained their memories looking for any hint that they knew who hired them to do … this thing.”
“To kill you,” he said. I looked at him and my mouth fell open a little hearing him verbalize it. “That’s the thing they were doing. They may have bombed your brother’s car, and that may be what makes you angry about it all, but … they tried to kill you, Sienna. The Brain is trying to kill you.”
“Who hasn’t tried that before?” I asked, weariness settling in on me as I recovered my composure.
“At some point you’re going to have to reconcile your feelings about that,” he said, “because—”
My phone chirped at me, and like Phillips before me, I was the asshole that answered it trying to find a way out of this uncomfortable conversation. Zollers’s face registered a note of surprise that he concealed expertly before I spoke. “Hello?”
“Hey,” J.J. said, a little tentative. “I have something for you.”
“Let it be a face to punch.”
“Uhh … not mine, I hope?” J.J. asked, sounding a little worried.
“I don’t punch your face,” I said, “I just hover over it ominously until you wake up screaming while looking into my angry, sensual eyes.”
“Uhhh …”
“J.J.,” I said, dropping the smartassery. “What?”
“Those emails,” J.J. said, “I’m not done sorting yet, but I got a fresh contact on something that just came through. A bartender as near as I can tell, someone who’s doing some ongoing work for your Brain—”
“The Brain employs its own bartenders?” I paused, eyes flitting around as I processed that. “It must have a hell of a drinking problem—”
“—and he’s got, like, spy reports,” J.J. went on, apparently knowing when to ignore me, “about you.”
I paused, letting that sink in. “Spy reports?”
“Yeah,” J.J. said. “Like, real intelligence gathering stuff. I searched back through the history of emails from this guy, and this bartender has been sending some real nasty nuggets to the Brain, stuff she’s been sending to reporters everywhere—”
I saw red, and I knew by the look on Zollers’s face that he knew that crimson was my color today. “Oh, my,” he said.
“Hey,” came a voice from outside the door. “Anyone in here?” Augustus Coleman peeked around the corner and looked straight at me, then Zollers. “Sorry. You left your door, uh … on the floor.”
I looked down at my hand, which shook, and I knew in that moment that the frosty cake of my emotions was definitely hiding veins of anger throughout, like chocolate. Sweet, vengeful chocolate. “Name and address,” I said, and my phone beeped before I even finished saying it, the map popping up automatically.
“Way ahead of y—” J.J. said as I hung up.
“Sienna—” Zollers started to say.
“Don’t.” I breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth. I came up with a solution before I’d even had time to think it through. “If you’re that worried, you can come with me.”
“Is this a field trip?” Augustus asked, his head sticking out from behind the scuffed wall. He looked better without the cervical collar. “Because I
need
to get out of here for a little while. Think those pain meds made me all itchy inside.”
“Sure,” I said, stalking my way around the corner and out the door. I could sense Dr. Zollers following me, and Augustus behind him, could hear their footsteps even as they tried to be quiet enough not to waken the furious crazy that was leading the procession. “The more the merrier.” Even though I knew that when I found this bartender, there damned sure wasn’t going to be much merriness to be had for anyone but the funeral parlor that got to bill for overtime after scraping him back together.