Two guards, one on each side of the room, waved to their respective security cameras, giving the all-clear before pivoting to face the cell block elevator with the rest of us. There were no numbers above the doors like you see sometimes in vids, nothing at all to indicate that the elevator was moving at all. As the minutes crept by, I could feel as much as hear both the guards and other visitors shifting restlessly.
Fifteen minutes later, the doors slid open. A line of inmates in orange jumpsuits, arms and legs shackled in front of them, shuffled into the meeting room, escorted by even more guards.
The lead prisoner was fucking enormous, a big black guy whose beard put my former roommate’s to shame. His faded jumpsuit strained across broad, muscular shoulders, and he was a head taller than anyone else in the room.
Titan, I decided, before my mind conjured up images of Alan Jackson and Stonewall. Or Shifter.
Three tables away, the tired-eyed woman who’d brought pictures of her twins managed to stop coughing long enough to flash a brilliant smile at the big man. His answering smile was almost lost in the darkness of his tangled beard.
“You see where to go, Jaws,” the lead escort rumbled. “No funny business or this visit ends early.”
After Jaws, there came a succession of inmates, some of them almost as imposing, many of them… not. Bushy Eyebrows Guy’s son was the spitting image of his old man, if taller and in considerably better shape. At the other end of the spectrum was Firewall, the aforementioned Technomancer, whose hairline had receded well past his ears, and who looked like a stiff wind would blow him over.
He wasn’t the most pathetic of the inmates though. Nor was it the trembling, shivering kid with the enormous nose and prominent Adam’s apple who the guards named Pusher—a Telekinetic, I assumed. Instead, that honor went to the last inmate off the elevator. He didn’t have a Black Hat name because he’d been caught after his very first murder. Almost fourteen years later, he was a misshapen bundle of skin and bones, with wide, staring eyes, and the same beak of a nose I saw whenever I looked in the mirror.
David-fucking-Jameson.
Crow. Murderer. Father.
•—•—•
My father tripped twice on the way over to my table, and each time, he had to be reoriented after getting back to his feet. When he arrived, he stood there staring blankly at the wall behind me. Finally, the nearest guard pushed him into his chair.
Dad had never been a great looking guy, even in Mom’s one memory, but now he looked like someone you’d find sleeping by a dumpster. His dark hair stuck up in every direction and his long, crooked nose dripped rivers of snot right past the corners of his half-open mouth. All the fat had been boiled away from his features, leaving too-prominent cheekbones and weathered pale skin.
We both had grey eyes, but mine were the color of old concrete, while his were paler. I’d have called them silver before I met Olympia and learned what real silver eyes looked like. I watched those eyes wander haphazardly around the room, like they were following a mosquito in flight. It was ten long seconds before he even noticed me. When he did, his eyes widened.
“Damian?”
I’d rehearsed what I was going to say. I’d even practiced my speech, just so I could maximize whatever time I got, but now that the moment had arrived, I couldn’t say a word. All I could see was his face as it had been, years earlier—to me as a five year old coming home to his mom’s murder, and to Mom when she’d fought to save my life—overlaid atop the desiccated figure sitting in front of me.
My plans went right out the window, taking those carefully rehearsed words with them. I was sliding one hand to the edge of the table, preparing to reach for Her Majesty’s gun, and questions and interrogation tactics be damned, when my father did something wholly unexpected.
He smiled.
The one thing I didn’t have was his smile. Sofia said I didn’t have a smile at all—just a threat of impending violence, dressed up in exposed ivory—but even as a child, my smile had been quieter, more private. My mom’s smile.
My dad’s smile was wide and jolly and heartfelt and he had no business making it, sitting across from the son he’d tried to kill, the son he had orphaned.
“Damian!” He blinked away tears, and beamed even more brightly. “Look at you, all grown up big and strong! Your mother must be so proud!” He looked around the room. “Where is she?”
And that’s when I realized my father didn’t know.
•—•—•
I sat there for a moment in stunned silence as my father’s voice rose to a whine.
“Where is she? Elora? Elora?!?!” He pulled his hands from the table and started to rise, but a guard was there in an instant, pushing him back down into his seat. The disgust on that guard’s face turned to pity as he looked my way.
He wasn’t the only one looking. Half the visitors were watching us, and at least as many of the inmates, although Jaws was focused on the two photos his wife was holding up even as she continued to cough.
With so many eyes on me, I had no chance of pulling the gun before someone stopped me, but there was no fucking way I was going to let this man cling to a fantasy where he hadn’t stabbed my mother eleven times, hadn’t stood over her as she bled out, as the cops and the paramedics came, far too late to do any good.
I leaned over the cold metal surface and caught his grey eyes with mine.
“She’s not coming, asshole. You killed her.”
He paused in mid-yell, and gave me a confused look. “Killed who?”
“Elora Banach. My mother. Your wife. Her blood. Your knife. Don’t you fucking sit there and tell me you don’t remember! You don’t get to do that!”
This time, the guard’s hand was on my shoulder, though I didn’t remember having risen from my seat. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down and lower your voice, or this visit is over.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” I dropped back down into the chair and made a show of unclenching my hands, and laying them, palms-down, on the table. Twenty-some minutes left, and I’d already managed to get a guard’s personal attention. This was going all wrong.
I lowered my voice, and spoke to my dad. “I need you to remember. Not just what you did but why. It’s important.”
“What I did?”
I gritted my teeth and tried again. “You came home from work early that day. You went to your closet, and you dug out a knife that Mom had never seen.”
His eyes sharpened, and for just a moment, I thought I had him.
There was more coughing from the woman with the photo… the longest and loudest bout yet. She brought a handkerchief to her mouth, and hacked into it like a smoker on her last lung. My father’s eyes danced away to focus on the new distraction. “Why did I want a knife?” he finally asked.
“This isn’t a story,” I told him. “This is what happened. This is why you’re here. I need you to think. Think about Elora.”
“Yes, Elora.” He nodded slowly, and I watched his face go even paler. “So much blood.”
Those three words almost did me in.
“Yes,” I finally managed. “There was blood everywhere.”
“On her dress. Her pretty yellow dress.” For the second time, tears glittered in my father’s eyes. He started to rock back and forth in his seat.
“Yes. You told her that you were going to kill me. You said—”
“You don’t understand, Elora,” he interrupted, eyes drifting away from my face again. “I’m doing this for you. I don’t know how I forgot, and I don’t know how she made me remember, but our son is meant for horrible things.”
I swallowed, but before I could ask the questions I’d come to ask, he kept going.
“I’m so sorry, my love. I should have told you about the visions. I should have told you about the headaches, but I thought I was going crazy. Then she came, and it was like a fog had been lifted. I remembered what he’d done to me. I remembered why. I knew what I had to do.�
�� Tears streamed down his gaunt face in dirty rivulets. “But it wasn’t supposed to be you. I swear it wasn’t!” He reached out with both manacled hands, not to me, but to someone past me.
I turned and saw Mom’s ghost standing behind me. For only the second time ever, she wasn’t smiling.
When I turned back, that same guard was back, pinning my father to his seat. I made sure my own hands were where they were supposed to be, and tried to catch my father’s attention.
“Who are you talking about? She came? She who? What he did to you? He who? Tell me why. Please…!”
“I’m sorry, Elora,” he said again, voice low but desperate, “I don’t know how she found me. One moment I was alone, the next she was there.”
“Who?” I hissed. “Who was there?”
For the first time in minutes, he looked in my direction, his eyes wide and empty. “Sally Jenkins, pale and wary, seems to be so ordinary.”
My blood went ice cold. “What did you just say?”
“But all the bodies she could bury,” he moaned, “would fill the whole world’s cemetery.”
My mind went blank and still, but before I could even begin to grapple with the enormity of what he had just said, I came to another realization… one that had nothing to do with my father’s words.
We were in the Hole, with its military grade dampeners.
There was no way my mother’s ghost could be present.
I looked to the guard behind my father, my own eyes suddenly wide. “Something’s wrong—”
A low snarl echoed through the room and Jaws sprang out of his chair. Thick coarse fur sprouted from his exposed skin, his jaw lengthening into a snout. Manacles snapped like they’d been crafted of tissue, and in one long, loping stride he was on top of the closest guard, tearing out the man’s throat with teeth that had become razor sharp.
For a moment, time came to a halt. I watched the dead guard’s body start to fall, as Jaws turned towards the next guard on the perimeter. I watched a second prisoner surge to his feet, fire issuing from his fingertips. Most of all, I saw Jaws’ wife, still seated, and the handkerchief that held the round object she’d just coughed up.
If it wasn’t Legion tech, it was one hell of a knock-off.
Then things really went to shit.
CHAPTER 71
I’d spent the last year training at the Academy. No matter what Backstreet said, everyone else knew it was the best place in the Free States for a Cape to learn. Our instructors were all top-notch, and from day one, they’d worked to train us for battle.
None of it prepared me for how quick and brutal a fight with Powers could be.
The guard at my table went up like a torch, one of many as a ribbon of white-hot fire lashed out across the room. Screams mixed with gunfire and bodies hitting the floor, and then just like that, it was over.
Thirty guards, eleven visitors, and nine inmates, dead in the time it took to draw a breath.
On the far side of the room, Jaws straightened out of his crouch, blood dripping from clawed hands. “Firewall. What’ve we got?”
The Technomancer held up an index finger. A few seconds later, he nodded. “I’m in.”
“Both elevators?”
“Yeah. Give me one more second, and…” Sweat beaded on the inmate’s scalp, then he smiled. Around us, I felt the dampeners go offline. “That’ll do it for the dampeners, too.”
“What about the cameras?”
“Overrode them as soon as the device came into play. No alarms registered on the network. We should be golden. I can hold this all as long as it takes.”
“You’ve got twenty-five minutes before we’re supposed to head up, hon,” called the tired-eyed woman who’d smuggled in the Legion device. “It’s going to be tight.”
“We knew it would be from the start,” Jaws growled, turning back to the Technomancer. “What about the dampeners in Cell Block F? Can you shut them down?”
“No dice. Every block’s on a different network, and all of them are out of my range. If I came down with you, I might be able to…”
“Nah, we need you up here, keeping the cameras looped and the elevators running. Red?”
“Yeah?” replied the Pyro who’d just killed a good thirty-five people. He was heavyset and blunt-featured, his smile almost as greasy as his hair.
“You’re on crowd control. I’m going to get the VIPs.”
“You sure you don’t want any backup down there?”
The Shifter took the bloody device from his wife, his clawed paw dwarfing her human hand. “The VIPs know we’re coming. This little thing should be all the backup I need.”
Moments later, he was on the second elevator and out of sight.
•—•—•
“Listen up, all you fine, law-abiding motherfuckers,” drawled Red, swaggering around the room like he owned it, “if you do exactly as I say, some of you just might make it out of here alive. Do otherwise, and you’ll share his fate.” He gestured, and one of the remaining prisoners was engulfed by a column of fire, the flames so hot the man barely even managed a scream.
“What the fuck, Red?” complained Firewall.
“Guy narced on me to the guards back in 69.” He scanned the room, and just that quickly, a second orange-clad inmate went up in flames. “And that one looked at me funny last week. As for the rest of you shackle-wearing assholes,” he continued, addressing the last six inmates, “I don’t know you, and I don’t give a fuck who you were before this. This is your shot at freedom. Join the cause if you want a place in the new world order. Stay out of our way otherwise.”
“You’re insane if you think you’re getting out of here alive,” declared the old man with the bushy eyebrows. “Just give up before you make things worse on yourselves.”
“Funny thing about life in the Hole, old man,” said Red, his grin going dangerous. “Ain’t much left to scare us with. And we’ve got a few surprises ready for the assholes upstairs. Too bad you won’t be around to see it—” He cut off as the imposing figure that had been seated across from the old man rose to his feet. “The fuck you think you’re doing, Stalwart?”
With Jaws gone, the Stalwart was the biggest guy left in the room. He looked across the table at the old man, and then back at the Pyro. “He’s my dad. I’m not going to let you hurt him.”
“Your dad’s got a big mouth. Someone his age should have learned better by now.” Red cocked his head. “How long has is it been since you saw daylight, Stalwart?”
“Nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years? God damn! That’s a whole fucking life already. How old were you when they sentenced you? Twelve?”
“Sixteen.”
“Ain’t that the way it goes. Just a kid but one mistake costs you the rest of your life. And here’s your old man, still kissing Cape ass. Maybe you should be the one killing him, not me.”
“Killing people is what got me here in the first place” The Stalwart shook his head. “Three dead in an armed robbery. All of them innocent. Nineteen years is less than I deserve.”
The Pyro spat to the side and looked past the Stalwart to his father. “Hold your head up, old man. You should be proud. It takes a special kind of stupid to spend nineteen years here and still feel guilty.” His hands came up and fire spat across the room at both of them.
Apparently, nobody had told Red that alcohol was the only way to surprise a Stalwart. As quick as the Pyro’s flames were, the other man was even quicker, rolling across the surface of the table to knock his father out of his chair and to the ground. A moment later, the Stalwart was back on his feet, the chains that shackled his arms and legs tearing apart with a noise that echoed through the room. He ducked another ball of fire and charged.
Every eye was fixed on the two dueling Powers. I reached into my suit coat and let the Legion gun fall into my hand. My father hadn’t even reacted to the mayhem around him. He was still in his chair, lost in his own world, pale lips flapping open and closed like a fish
out of water.
I raised the gun and placed its oddly shaped barrel directly between his eyes.
“This is for Mom, you piece of shit.”
Even then, he didn’t look at me, pale grey eyes still fixed over my shoulder on my mother’s unsmiling ghost. I watched his mouth form unvoiced words, watched something like a smile spread back across his face.
I pulled the trigger.
•—•—•
In Weapons class, Jessica Strich taught us that every gun had a different trigger pull. The Legion weapon’s trigger was smooth as silk, sliding back with the tiniest bit of pressure. On some guns, that would have been the end of it. On this gun, I hit a point where resistance built in the trigger.
Single-stage trigger vs. double-stage. Usually, the difference between them is just a matter of knowing exactly when the gun will fire. This one time, it was the difference between being a cold-blooded murderer and… I don’t know. Something else.
I hit that point of resistance and stopped. Held it there for an impossibly long moment and then finally let my finger fall away. I wasn’t a Cape. I’d never be a fucking Cape. But I wasn’t the kind of asshole who just sat back and let innocent people die either.
Gun still extended, I turned to the action.
The Stalwart charged through a conjured wall of fire. His orange jumpsuit ignited, and exposed skin went black and smoking, but his extended hand caught the fleeing Pyro’s arm, and the crack of a snapping bone joined the roar of the flames.
Red scrambled backward, one arm hanging loosely at his side, the other reaching behind him for balance. The Stalwart bounced off the wall, changed direction and came right back in.
He was within arm’s reach when Red opened his mouth and spat fire.
Somehow, the Stalwart dodged most of the blast, but he staggered and went to one knee.
I rose to my feet sighted along the Legion gun’s short barrel.
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