She stared at the energy bullet cupped in his hand, fascinated, her eyes widening fractionally. Her voice surprisingly husky, she said, “Okay. You're the real thing. Gabriel Bleak, you are required to come with me—and right now. The federal government requires your presence.”
He looked closely at her. When she'd said,
The federal government requires your presence,
he'd sensed ambivalence. She was a strong woman, and she could make an arrest. But she didn't quite believe in the job. She wasn't completely one of
them.
She'd do her job. But he could hear the doubt in her voice; see it in her eyes. Too bad he had no time to persuade her to let him go. Other agents would be not far away. And they'd be here soon.
Bleak shook his head. “Like to help you out. But last time the government 'required' me, things kinda...didn't work out.”
He tossed the energy bullet from his right hand to his left, as if one hand were playing catch with the other. The flaring, hissing passage of it startled her—she took half a step back. He grinned.
“Easy with that thing,” she snapped. “Just—get rid of it. Trust us and it'll be all right. I can't guarantee your safety if you don't surrender.”
“Mind telling me, for starts, what happens if I go with you?”
“I was just told to get a...a confirmation on you. Then I bring you in. I don't know any more than that.”
She delivered the disclaimer believably. But Bleak could feel dishonesty the way someone else might feel a sudden cold breeze. She'd been honest right up to
I don't know any more than that.
He looked into her eyes—and felt himself held there. An indefinable familiarity hummed between their interlocked gazes, in that long moment. As if he knew...not her face—but something inside her.
She glanced over her shoulder, showing a flicker of irritation—and not irritation with him.
He tossed the energy bullet back to his other hand. It made a sizzling sound passing through the air. “Expecting someone?”
She looked at the glow of power nestled in his hand. “Put that thing
out
and just... come along. We'll talk, Mr. Bleak. All right?”
“Love to have a drink with you, if you had a different profession, miss. I might even have gone with 'just come along.' But.. just 'come along' with a government agent?” He shook his head. “I've got work to do, for one thing.”
“You're a skip tracer, from what I've heard. You can do that anytime. We don't need to be in any kind of...of confrontation, here.”
“Sure, okay, but—come to think of it...” He tossed the energy bullet up so it hissed and spiraled, caught it in his right hand. “You haven't even shown me ID. They make up badges for your department yet?” He smiled. There was something about her...
She grimaced, glanced over her shoulder again.
“Someone slow to back you up?” Bleak added thoughtfully, “You're not NYPD or FBI. I'd have had their badges stuck in my face till I was blind...so that leaves CCA, right?”
She looked at him flatly, then tilted her purse so he could see the badge clipped to the inside flap:
HOMELAND SECURITY, CENTRAL CONTAINMENT AUTHORITY.
“CCA agent Loraine Sarikosca. So you know about CCA. Not many are aware it exists. Lot of you people know?”
“I think I read about it on the Internet somewhere.” Truth was, all the ShadowComm knew. A few had escaped and told their stories. And the Hidden disclosed a good many secrets.
She gave a small shake of her head. “The Internet. I don't think so.”
“Way it is now, anybody can be detained. So I guess I won't ask what
authority you
have. But”— he tossed the energy bullet from his right hand to his left—”what
excuse
do you have?” “What?” She seemed startled. As if she'd been wondering herself. “What rationale? What excuse? To just take people away.”
Her eyes followed the energy bullet as it went back to his right hand. “There is a...a national security directive...having to do with extraordinary paranormal capabilities. The risk to the public... the possibility you could be of...” She broke off, licking her lips.
“What were you going to say—about the possibility? That I could be useful?”
“We'll talk about it in the car.”
“Will we?”
Bleak saw the uncertainty in her eyes—and saw it locked away, a moment later. Her eyes going cold.
“Yes,” she said, her voice flat. “Now...I'm going to ask you to make that little fireball of yours go away. Here—I' 11 turn off the detector. Even steven.” She clicked the device off with a flick of her thumb, put it in the purse as casually as a woman putting away a cell phone—but her hand came out of the purse with the gun.
Bleak knew the gun was coming and was already releasing the bullet with a snapping motion— like a man snapping a whip. The energy bullet sped from his hand like a spinning meteor, straight at her rising gun-hand, whistling faintly as it went. She shouted in surprise and pain as the packet of energy struck her snub-nosed .38 square in the cylinder, sent it flying from her singed fingers—its metal glowing red-hot, trailing smoke.
“Get down!” he yelled, rushing around the pool table to tackle her, the two of them going heavily to the tiled floor. The gun clattered against the wall—and exploded, as every bullet in the gun went off, detonated by the energy charge, bullets cracking into the ceiling and the floor, the room acrid with gun smoke. She tried to pull away...he thought he felt her heartbeat, for a moment...hoped she knew he was trying to save her life.
“What the fuck!” yelled Seamus from the next room.
Bleak had an impulse to see if Agent Sarikosca was okay—he liked her nerviness, and he knew she was just doing her job—but he made himself get up and dodge into the men's room instead.
“Come back here, dammit!” she yelled, behind him. So good. She was okay.
“Call nine-whuh-one!” one of the barflies yelled, in the background, as Bleak turned, slammed the door shut, then shot a burst of energy from his hand to melt the metal of the lock. Not enough to hold it forever, but it'd slow her down. A moment later the door creaked as someone on the other side slammed it with a shoulder. “Call nine-whuh-one!” shrieked the barfly again, muffled now.
Two booths on the right, urinals left, sink and window straight ahead. He shook his head, looking at the glazed-glass window over the sink. Painted shut, and anyway too small for him.
But he heard her out there, talking on a cell. “Yeah, just get in here—he's blocked the door somehow—” Then an aside to Seamus: “I'm sorry, sir, this is federal business, you're going to have to stay out of here.... No, sir, there's no fire, just a small explosion.... No, sir, I'm not hurt, now you're going to have to...”
Bleak walked over to the sink, examined the wall. Touched it with the palm of his hand. Maybe.
Thump!
as someone slammed into the door. Grunted in pain. Slammed it again. And there were more agents coming.
Bleak sighed. It seemed he'd used up this bar. Seamus wasn't going to be happy with him.
Nothing to lose. He put his hands on the wall above the sink, closed his eyes. Drew energy from the background field, channeled it through his arms...
He stopped, aware of a spiritual scrutiny. Deep contact with the background field exposed any disembodied entities handy; it revealed the Hidden. And someone was there.
Bleak opened his eyes and found he was staring at himself in slightly reflective window glass over the sink—and saw that something...someone...was behind him, looking over his shoulder. A set of disembodied eyes. A face was filling in, around them. Looked like a teenage boy, maybe eighteen. Just old enough to get into a bar in New York. He could even make out the acne, because that was how the ghost thought of itself.
A drug OD, Bleak suspected. The ghost might have been here for years.
“You ought to let go, kid,” Bleak said. “You're stuck here. You're dead, see.”
The kid shook his head, at first like someone shaking their head “no,” then faster and faster, till his face was a blur, as he receded, his denial becoming a retreat through space itself—and Bleak closed his eyes again, focused the power he'd drawn, directed it into the wall above the sink, felt the plaster crack and shudder and give way. Something clanged noisily to the floor.
Bleak opened his eyes to see a rough oblong hole, a gap three feet high in the wall, the sink broken down on the tiles, water gushing from a pipe, wetting his boots.
He heard the door breaking down behind him—
He reached out, caught the still-hot edges of the wall, wincing at the contact, put his right foot on the pipe, and levered himself up and through, out partway into the alley behind the building. Running footsteps behind him; someone grabbed his left ankle but he twisted free, got to his feet in the alley. A car was just pulling in twenty-five yards to his left, one of the dark blue, compact natural-gas hybrids favored by the CCA. Bleak thought about invoking help from the disembodied, but he didn't want to incur debts if he didn't have to. He started to the right, looking for a way out—but it was a dead end. Trash cans against a brick wall.
He turned back toward the car rolling slowly, inexorably toward him. Someone was hurrying up behind the car—a blond man in a suit, an agent in wraparound mirror sunglasses, raising a pistol. Someone behind him yelled, “Keep your head down, Arnie!”
“You!” shouted “Arnie” from behind the car. “Hands up! You've assaulted a federal agent! I've got every right to take you down! Hands up, do it now!” He was aiming his pistol over the top of the car.
Bleak backed up, coalescing another energy bullet in his right hand.
Agent Sarikosca appeared at the alley's mouth, behind Arnie, her mouth open. She'd been running. She glared past the blond agent.
“Bleak! Put your hands on the wall, give it up! I promise you won't be harmed!”
“Don't make promises you can't keep,” Bleak said, looking up toward a fire escape. No, out of reach.
The car was bearing down on him...and stopped, rocking on its shocks, about thirty feet away.
He thought he might be able to hit the sedan with a compacted energy bullet to make the engine explode, but if he did that, he'd probably kill the guys inside. And he didn't want to kill anyone if he didn't have to.
He knew what surrendering to the CCA could mean. Maybe the stories about its prisoners were just rumors, but he thought it wiser to believe them.
“I'm counting two and I'm opening fire!” Arnie yelled. That made up Bleak's mind for him.
Heart thudding so loudly he seemed to hear it echo in the alley, Bleak snapped the energy bullet toward the agent—aiming it so it'd whip close to the man's left ear. Scare him into screwing up his aim. The agent yelled, ducked aside from the meteoric energy bullet, fired his weapon as he stumbled. A bullet cracked past Bleak. He'd heard that sound often enough in his life to know what it was.
Still recoiling from Bleak's energy bullet, Arnie stumbled back—
Bleak ran straight for the car coming at him. As he went, he reached out to the planetary field, felt it concentrated between the narrow walls of the alley. A pretty strong water source must run under the pavement. That helped.
He stretched out his arms wide as he ran, caught the energy in his opened hands, compressed it with the extension of his senses, molding it into a shape formed by his mind.
The car's driver and passenger were opening their doors, getting out with guns in hand—but Bleak was running up an invisible ramp in the air. Right over their car.
“Son of a
bitcM
” the driver shouted—he was another set of sunglasses in a suit—as Bleak ran through the air above the car, creating more of the invisible ramp ahead of him as he went. He waved the ramp away just as he passed the trunk of the car on the far side, and the support vanished from under him. He dropped down to a crouch behind the agents as one of them, the driver, got out of the car and turned, fired at him, the bullet cutting the air near his shoulder.
Then Arnie was there, right in front of him on the sidewalk, raising the gun. Bleak used more standard combat skills, Ranger hand-to-hand. He set himself and kicked out, connecting with Arnie's wrist. Arnie yelped in pain, grimacing, as the gun spun away. Agent Sarikosca came from behind her partner, tried to barricade Bleak, but he dodged past her, like a quarterback with the football, and kept going, leaving her and Arnie behind.
Running, Bleak sensed someone he knew on the sidewalk ahead. Wondered if it was coincidence. It was Pigeon Lady: an elderly woman no more than five feet tall, who seemed to live in a perpetual flurry of pigeons; a droppings-white watch cap pulled over her spray of gray hair; she wore layers of bird-spackled wool, whatever the weather, stuck with fallen pinfeathers. And she wore pigeons like more clothing, something like thirty of them whirring and cooing about her, sitting on her head, her shoulders, her arms, whether she was feeding them or not. Her seamed face turned toward him; her watery eyes took him in, running past. Nodded distantly to him, turning to see men with suits, sunglasses, and guns five strides behind him. Feds, aiming at Bleak's back.
The pigeons erupted from her in a volcanic cloud of flapping blue and gray, making whickering sounds in their flurrying, to fill the air just behind Bleak. They flew at the faces of the CCA men; flapping wildly, blocking all sight of the agents' quarry, for several long, precious moments.
Carried on the psychic wind of their wings, Bleak heard thoughts, other people's thoughts he could never ordinarily have heard. He was not usually telepathic—not like that. Mostly he could only hear the minds of the dead.
Run, cross the street, Bleak,
the Pigeon Lady thought.
We 11 keep them back.
Someone else thinking,
What the hell's up with these birds ? It's like that Hitchcock movie... the damn things 're too close to my eyes... the smell, the feathers—
Where's he gone ?
There—I've got a shot at him!
“No, Drake, hold your fire, you'll hit civilians!” Sarikosca shouted, as Bleak sprinted up Thirty-fifth toward Broadway, running full out, suddenly aware of the humid heat. As if he were running upstream through hot water. He drew his power from the living environment around him, but the process took something from him too—had taken a great deal for that last little gag, running on the air