Authors: Robert J. Crane
I broke down the door without regard for property, or a warrant, or public safety, or … well, much of anything, really. It busted inward, swung on a shattered frame, and hung in my way until I just ripped it off with a second hit and sent it spiraling into the drywall behind it.
“Honey, I’m home,” I said as I pushed my way inside and saw someone spring up off a couch to my left, coughing on a cigarette that dangled between astonished lips and that flew out on the next good hacking. It gave the room a stink, that lit cigarette, reminding me a little of when I’d breathed in the toxic burning of a car’s interior a few hours earlier.
The smoker in question was a shade under six feet, skinny, heavily tattooed, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and clearly scared shitless by the sight of someone crashing into his house without announcement. I knew from what J.J. had sent me that this bartender’s name was Charles O’Shea. He didn’t look Irish to me, though sometimes it’s tough to tell when someone’s scared shitless.
He bolted for the archway behind him, where I could see a dining room, and I caught up with him before he got more than a few steps, seizing hold of his naked shoulders and shoving him roughly into the waiting arms of Augustus, who had followed behind me. He grabbed the guy with a little nervous gusto, like he was afraid he was going to get caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
I walked over and stubbed out the cigarette with my boot on the carpet, but I doubted it was going to cost him a security deposit since by the look of the place he’d lost that a long time ago. There were holes in the walls, probably a hundred dollars' worth of stereo equipment that looked like it had been dragged right out of the seventies surrounding one of those old-school widescreen TVs, the sort that weighs tons because it has to project the image on the front of the TV like a movie theater exists inside the huge contraption. “The hell?” I wondered, looking at it all. “Is this some kind of mania for vintage or do you just not have the money for a modern flatscreen?”
“Picture’s better on this,” he asserted, surprisingly defiant for a guy who was being held in something close to a submission hold whilst nearly naked by a pretty tall man, while a humorless woman picked over his choice in electronics.
“Yeah,” Augustus said, “and eight tracks sound better than CDs.”
I eased closer to the guy and caught sight of the fear in his eyes. “You know who I am?”
He blinked, looking left and catching sight of Zollers. “No,” he said sullenly.
I didn’t even need to look at Zollers to know he was lying. “That was a rhetorical question,” I said. “Everyone knows who I am.”
“Try to pretend like you don’t enjoy it,” he scoffed, with way more courage than I would have had in his utter-lack-of-shoes.
“Hey, I know this guy,” Augustus said, turning Charles’s head to look at his face in profile. “This is your brother’s bartender.”
Augustus was an honest man, and while that wasn’t a fault, it certainly cost him a little trouble this time as I not-gently-at-all ripped Charles O’Shea the bartender out of his loving embrace and put the bastard through his own glass coffee table. His ashtray got caught up on the metal frame and followed a second later, delivering a nice thump and a load of nastiness to the back of O’Shea’s head and leaving a knick on his scalp the length of my forefinger.
I dragged Charlie up and slammed him into the drywall with about a hundredth of the force and a millionth of the rage I had available on hand. His eyes squinted shut in pain, then opened just a sliver experimentally. “I’m still here, dipshit,” I said, and rammed him into the wall again. Lightly, I swear. If he died of this, it’d be from embarrassment or an undisclosed heart condition, because these were my version of love taps. “I am not a figment of your imagination.”
“What do you want?” Charles asked, two steps past panic.
“Not interior decorating tips,” I said. I tried to decide if I should just steal his memories here, in front of everybody and ruled it out. I caught a knowing look from Zollers as he made his way over to lean against the wall so I could see him plainly even as I held Charles an inch or so off the ground against it. He knew what I was thinking, knew what I’d done, and knew I was ashamed of it. Partaking of someone’s memories, their soul, it always felt like something dirty to me, like something I should hide from. I had an easier time knowing that there were pictures of my blurry, naked ass streaking across the skies of various cities where my clothes had been burned off in fights than coping with the idea that anyone would see me taking memories out of someone’s head.
It was private, it was weird, and it was the last thing I had left that I didn’t want to admit to anyone.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Zollers said, sparing me the awkward discomfort of reaching into Charlie Boy’s mind to figure that out for myself. Dr. Zollers plainly didn’t think reaching into minds was that awkward, but his method didn’t result from inappropriately long and awkward touches that released a feeling inside me that was akin to—well, you know. In that regard, I felt way, way too close to the succubi of fiction, the ones that everyone in the press seemed super eager to lump me in with. Like an idiot with a hammer who saw nothing but nails everywhere, everything was about sex with these bastards. Put the hammer away, you dinks. “If you want,” Zollers said, “I’ll take him to the police in his car, let you two drive back to HQ on your own.”
I let Charles go, frowning. “Why?” I asked, turning to look at him.
Zollers shrugged lightly. “Do you trust me?”
I started to smart off, then stopped myself. “Yeah.”
He held out a hand, and I shoved Charles roughly toward him. As I did so, I saw a glazed look run over Charles O’Shea’s face that told me he wasn’t going to escape Zollers’s custody of his own volition. “See you back there.” Zollers smiled weakly, and Charlie walked behind him in perfect sync.
“Was that weird?” Augustus asked me, stepping up to stand at my side, scratching his head.
“Yes.” We watched them go, and I shook my head, trying to figure out the next move. “We should …” I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Go back, I guess.”
“Yeah, all right,” he said, shrugging. He was walking a little tentatively, and he led the way back to the car, one of the dark agency SUVs that we took everywhere. “You think you’re gonna calm down anytime soon?” He looked at me sideways on that one.
“Sorry,” I said as I made my way to the driver’s seat and unlocked the door. I hated driving, but every time I suggested Augustus do it he called me Miss Daisy, another of his never-ending attempts at humor.
“You about ripped that guy out of my hands,” he said, getting in the front seat of the SUV and slamming the door behind him as I did the same. “I mean, I’m just recovering here, thought I’m going out on some nice, light little detail where we go to brace some punk, and …” He frowned as I started the car. “You know, we didn’t even get anything out of that.”
“I know,” I said, sighing, letting my head slump forward a little. “We’re on the wrong side of the email wall, here, chasing this guy and those assassins I got this morning. It’s like there’s a watertight compartment between us and the Brain, and—” I paused, catching a hint of something in the air.
“What?” Augustus locked eyes with me and must have seen the alarm in my face, because he started to look a little panicked, too.
“Watertight compartments can get busted open, too,” said a voice from the back seat as I spun around to look at the young man waiting there, his glasses catching a gleam from the sunlight outside, his dark skin only a few shades off from the leather he sat upon. “You just need someone like me to make like an iceberg and do the work.”
“Jamal!” Augustus half-hissed, half-screamed, looking more than a little perturbed at his brother. “You scared the hell out of me! Who creeps into the backseat of a fricking federal agency car and just sits there? What if she’d killed you, scaring her like that?”
“Hey,” I said, nonplussed. “I haven’t even killed anyone yet today, and if ever there was a time for it—” I looked him up and down. “Also, I’m not the one who looks scared.”
“Well, he startled me,” Augustus said, more than a little nonplussed himself. Looking like he had a wicked case of the shakes, he rounded on his brother again. “What are you doing here?”
“Heard you broke your back,” Jamal said, all cool. I didn’t know him all that well, but he struck me as that sort of guy, calm almost all the time. I’d implicated him in a series of revenge murders that he’d performed down in Atlanta after the woman that he loved got killed by a criminal conspiracy, but he’d done the deed with lightning powers and brought an even bigger problem to light, so I’d let him skate.
Maybe I could sympathize with his plight a little. Or something.
“Well, my back got broken,” Augustus said, “I didn’t do the breaking myself, though.” He frowned. “How’d you even hear about that?”
“Digital eyes everywhere, brother,” Jamal said, looking out the window. “Always watching.”
“That’s a little creepy,” I said.
“It’s a brave new world,” Jamal said, leaning forward. “You know what kind of people it has in it?”
I squinted at him, trying to decipher his meaning. “All sorts. Which kind are you talking about?”
He licked his lips. “The kind that you can’t get through the watertight wall into.”
Augustus gave his brother a look. “Jamal, what are you doing here?”
“Well, I was in town to check up on you, little brother,” he said. Jamal was probably a good five inches shorter than Augustus. “But I figured once I saw what was going on, I could lend a hand to someone who’s in a situation not unlike one I’m familiar with.”
“You want to help her get revenge?” Augustus asked, disbelief written across his face. “Haven’t you done enough of that on your own?”
“Wait,” I said, holding out a hand to get Augustus to stifle himself, “you want to help me?”
“If your enemies are throwing darts at you,” Jamal said, pushing his lips together as he paused to let that thought sink in, “they’re hitting other places on the board now. This Anselmo guy that came at Augustus, he was straight out of their camp.”
“What do you know about all this?” Augustus asked, looking at his brother with a dose of skepticism strong enough to stun a bull elephant. “How much have you been watching?”
Jamal touched a finger to the door. A spark of electricity ran through, unlocking the doors with a sharp click that caused Augustus to jump. “I’m watching more than anyone else lately.”
I pondered his offer, that cold fury that had been coursing through me only a few minutes earlier as I kicked down Charles O’Shea’s door metamorphosing into something different, something I still couldn’t describe, or maybe something I didn’t want to. The layers of the cake were getting even more muddled. “What do you need?” I asked, and the only thing I could really identify was … hunger. Desire to know.
“Take us back to your headquarters,” Jamal said, nodding at the road ahead. “I need a computer and some time, and I’ll open your eyes.”
“Whoa,” Augustus said, and he landed a hand on my arm. I eyed it and he pulled it back like he'd gotten burned. “You sure this is a good idea?”
“He’s your brother,” I said, putting the car into gear. “It’d be rude not to at least listen.” And I pushed gently down on the accelerator pedal instead of slamming it to the floor like I wanted to, controlling my breath as I hurried to get us home, back to where I could finally get some answers.
I stood watching Jamal do his thing from over J.J.’s shoulder, ignoring the workday noise of the agency’s fourth floor as I waited for the results. The whole place had a quiet, placid feel to it, like the people who worked here hadn’t quite recovered from the manhunt that had dragged so many extra hours of effort out of them. It was like someone had given them all a shot of sedation and they were just trying to keep from toppling over for a snooze right on the carpet between cubicles.
“How in the hell are you doing this?” J.J. asked in awe, adjusting his glasses as Jamal’s fingers danced over the keys, presumably unlocking doors J.J. only wet-dreamed about.
“My power is over electricity,” Jamal said, not stopping as he explained. “Most people who have that use it for bolts of lightning and such. I refined it over a couple years, figured out how to control 1’s and 0’s, even at a distance.”
“Yeah,” Augustus said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, “you’re a real badass. You’re like a nerdy, black Cole McGrath.”
Jamal paused to look up at his brother. “And you call me a nerd, throwing out the name Cole McGrath like people should know who that is.”
I’ll admit it, I didn’t have a clue. “Who’s Cole McGrath?” I whispered to J.J., forgetting that the Colemans were both metas and could hear me.
“I understood that reference,” J.J. said with pride, like a sunbeam was about to burst out of his chest. “These are my people.” He paused as Jamal and Augustus both looked at him cockeyed, and J.J. thrust his hands up. “No! Wait! Not like that! Not what I meant!”
“I think I’m about to kill you all,” I said, letting a little frustration bubble out. “Can we get on with—”
“Sienna!” Ariadne’s voice cracked across the floor.
I controlled my spin, gracefully coming about with a faux smile on my face. “Yesssssss?”
Ariadne came into the cubicle, looking at me like I was being weird. Which I was. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m about to bust this case wide open,” I said, glancing back at Augustus. He shook his head at me, clearly disapproving of me saying it like that. I toned it down and tried again. “Jamal was about to show us who’s responsible for all my problems.”
“What do you mean, responsible for all your problems?” She put her hands on her hips. “You cause more than a few of them yourself, like hitting a reporter—”
“Actually, this Brain sent those reporters to ambush Sienna,” Jamal said helpfully. I was suddenly much happier I’d let him get away with murder. Uhhh … it sounds bad when I say it like that, doesn’t it? “She’s also been feeding reporters all sorts of bad info, rumors and stuff—”