Apex

by Robert J. Crane

  The man just hung there, fire burning at his fingertips, and then suddenly … it started to glow brighter. “I am.”

  His attack was dramatic, fire flaring at her in an orange glow, bulbs of it streaking toward her in the night. Jamie yanked herself down on one of the gravity channels, the one planted at the edge of the island below her. It pulled her back and down, and at the same time, a second later, she activated the two she’d subtly attached to his feet, and his glowing hands were yanked in the other direction.

  Have to avoid the flames, Jamie thought, tempted to slap herself for thinking the obvious. Of course she had to avoid the flames. Who would want to jump through them willingly—

  Oh. Right. Sienna Nealon.

  But Jamie wasn’t crazy like that, so she just bent and let the next gravity channel whip her around the base of the statue as the ones she’d left on the man did the work of pulling him down. She’d slide around the base of the statue as her channels worked, and she’d catch him near the ground and set up a flux around him, a field that even fire couldn’t escape. Once that was done, she’d—

  A roar reached her ears just before a power burst of water came ripping out of the harbor and engulfed her. The freezing wash soaked through her costume in a bracing shock. Her skin went numb, her breath left her in a single, urgent exhalation, and she halted in place.

  Her mouth opened of its own accord, to let the air out in a rush, and she blasted out the other side of the sudden wash, trying to wrap her analytical mind around what had just happened.

  She was still a hundred feet above the water, and it looked—well, not calm and placid, because it was the harbor, but it was relatively still. How had that water come rushing up to—

  Her answer came a moment later when another blast of it shot out of the harbor like an erupting geyser and flew at her. The harbor’s surface below looked like a bank of cannons firing off, pelting frigid water at her. Soaked to the skin, Jamie dodged, even though the blasts were not particularly hard. They didn’t carry the power that, say, Scott Byerly’s attacks did, but they certainly had enough force that she didn’t want to be hit by them—

  Just as she was steering her way around the Statue of Liberty, a gust of wind hit her with a fist-like impact. Jamie’s immediate gravity channels released—they were a series she was guiding like spokes off the Statue’s waist—and she dipped before she caught herself on one that was reversing gravity, anchored to the ground, keeping her aloft. She tumbled forward but not down, thankfully, and came around the statue’s waist to find—

  The man was just hanging there where she’d anchored him, hands still burning, his back to her, waging his own war against the channels she’d set up against his feet to drag him to the earth. He was moving down, slowly, their drag eventually winning against him, though he seemed to be fighting them with his flight.

  Well, let’s speed this up, Jamie thought. She reached out, intending to increase the drag—

  The sound of something behind her made her use the statue to set up a repelling channel, and she vaulted away from the statue just as another series of water blasts peppered the surface. They chased her as she dodged them, dipping lower to the ground as she moved away from the most concentrated center of the gravity channel that was holding her aloft. She threw down another at the edge of Liberty Island to keep her from dropping as she moved out from the center of power of the one she’d used before. That was the problem with using gravity channels to keep aloft; once you got too far from them, they weakened in their ability to keep you rising. It was why she always had to use the Statue of Liberty as a guidance point for getting to and from Staten Island.

  Jamie anchored to the torch and pulled herself back up in a blindingly fast ascent, riding the channel like she had a bungie cord attached to her belt. She flew up and around as the torch’s surface was blasted with water behind her.

  Her mind was racing, the cold seeping in, slowing her reactions. Hypothermia had to be on the way, if it hadn’t settled in already. How would that affect her, as a metahuman, Jamie wondered? Surely she was more resistant to it than a normal person, but the way she felt—soaked, teeth chattering—didn’t seem that terribly different from what a normal person would be experiencing.

  She could also feel herself moving just a hair slower.

  This man, this meta—he was using fire powers, water powers, and it felt like air powers, in addition to the power of flight. Two of those, Sienna had before … well, Scotland. The others, Reed and Scott had possessed.

  But—her mind wrangled with the thought—those powers didn’t come naturally together. They were—

  Another blast of wind sent Jamie tumbling sideways. She landed another anchor on the statue’s torch, then started to secure another to the ground, trying to just maintain her altitude. It wouldn’t do to—

  Water blasted her, finding her in the air and submerging her, causing Jamie to once again exhale mightily. Darkness squeezed in at the edges of her consciousness, and freezing liquid started to seep up her nose, forcing its way into her mouth.

  She gagged, but it only got worse. It forced its way into her sinuses, chilling her as she choked, mightily, the freezing water pushing down her throat and into her belly, seeping cold through her entire being.

  The gravity channels she’d laid down—dozens in the last few minutes—started to release, one by one, as the water invaded her, choked her—

  Drowned her.

  And Jamie Barton started to fall as the light of consciousness began to fade. The man with the flaming hands was in front of her for just a moment, and his face was frozen in brief satisfaction. There for but a flicker and then gone as he was gone, flying upward—

  No.

  She was tumbling down.

  Jamie dropped, one of the channels steering her, almost by accident, to the edge of Liberty Island. It pulled, one of only two she had left, her brain reduced to mere instinct as she warred with the water that threatened to drown her.

  She burst free of the liquid entrapping her, but it was within her now, water in her mouth, in her lungs, streaming out of her nose as she plunged toward the surface of the harbor—

  Jamie Barton hit the water lightly, the second-to-last gravity channel she’d set up at the edge of the island cushioning her to a drop of a mere six feet; into the frigid harbor she plunged. The gravity tether’s job done, it released.

  And left her with only one. Operating on the instinct, grabbing hold of it like a drowning woman—which she was—she activated it.

  Darkness followed, and Jamie struggled. She broke the surface seconds later, heaving up water, heaving up liquid, heaving up …

  Death.

  She was choking, she couldn’t breathe, it was in her and everywhere, like a weight pushing all the air out of her. There was a steady tug, dragging her through the water, waist high, but her head was out, her chest was out of the freezing water, but it was in her, drowning her, and she jerked, furiously, trying to get it out of her, out of—

  Voices in the distance. Shouts in the night.

  She felt a thump, her shoulders against something. City lights glared, twinkled, in the distance, but Jamie’s mind was panicked, frenzied, only on one thing.

  Breathe. Can’t—breathe!

  “Hang on, hang on!” someone said, male. Someone grabbed her shoulders, dragging her up.

  “Get her out, get her out!” Someone else seized her, pulling her up, up, from where her shoulders rested hard against—

  The Staten Island Ferry.

  They pulled her out, onto the deck, and water streamed out of Jamie’s mouth. Darkness was pressing in on all sides, panic at a fevered pitch. She was drowning, drowning on the ship’s deck, but—

  Water streamed from her mouth, and she took her first hacking, wheezing cough.

  “She’s got water in the lungs,” one of the people surrounding her said. His face pushed in, in the haze. “We’re going to get you to Richmond University Medical Center, Jamie. Don’t
you worry. We got you, okay? You just relax. You’re—”

  Home, Jamie thought, as the darkness swelled around her, swirling, and took her into it, there on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sienna

  Iwoke up with a hangover. The night was like black tar poured outside the window where I rested my head. No moon, no lights waited outside the glass as I blinked at my own reflection staring back at me, just ink-stained night and the refracted instrument panel of the SUV behind my shadowed face in the window.

  Smacking my lips together, I pulled my aching head off the glass. A cool feeling persisted against my cheek where it had rested against the flat window, and a thumping pain radiated out from within. I was getting used to hangovers—sort of. As used to them as you can get, I guess.

  “Well, good morning, sunshine,” Harry Graves’s voice greeted me from the driver’s seat. I made a low moan as I turned toward him, and found the bottle he’d gifted me corked and resting in the cup holder. I stared at it; it was the perfect size, and I suspected he’d planned that when he’d bought the damned thing. Precognitive asshole, showing off.

  As if in answer to my thought, he tossed me a bottle of ibuprofen that I caught, just barely. I opened it and dumped three into my hand. I swallowed them without liquid, and though I was sorely tempted to embrace the hair of the dog that bit me, I found the bottle empty when I gave it a look.

  “You dump the rest out?” I asked.

  “Not me,” Harry said. “Your Irish lady did.”

  I turned my head to give Eilish a piece of my mind, but she was sleeping, conked out in the back, mouth open, head back. A soft, ragged snuffling was coming from her open mouth, and mercy won out. I let her sleep.

  Cassidy was lit by a computer screen, tapping away without saying anything. I knew she’d noticed my awakening, so I figured she didn’t have anything to add at present, and I didn’t give enough of a damn to ask her what she was up to. Instead I faced forward, staring into the darkness ahead, where a single light about a quarter mile off aided our headlights in telling me we were on a two-lane road with nothing but green around us.

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked.

  “Last sign I saw said we were in Ashville, Alabama,” Harry said, and he broke into a grin that I found … well, I should have found it infuriating. I was surprisingly neutral on it at the moment, though. “We’re heading north, taking the road less traveled.”

  “We were supposed to be on I-75 or I-95,” I said, massaging my scalp. It didn’t help.

  “No, we’re supposed to be heading north,” Harry said, “and exactly this way. Trust me.”

  “Why would I trust you?” I asked. “You took my instruction and promptly discarded it in favor of doing—I dunno, whatever the hell you wanted to do.” I blinked at him, his rugged chin. “What the hell are you doing, Harry?”

  “I’m driving,” he said, still grinning. Still not infuriating. Must have been his boyish charm. “Trust me.”

  “Ugh,” I said, pitching my head forward and giving my kinked neck muscles a chance to not annoy the hell out of me by screaming like my head. “You didn’t answer why I should trust you the first time I asked.”

  “Because I know what I’m doing,” Harry said.

  “Yes, but I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, “and two-way communication is so important to trust and also your continued survival.”

  He made a production of letting out a grand sigh. “The interstate corridors back east are being fiercely watched right now. Cops, Department of Homeland Security—there’ll all be on it. And while you’ve a neat little trick to mask your face on cameras, it’s not going to help with the immense number of patrols rolling through there at the moment. I caught a probability—if we took those routes, you were going to get spotted, and all manner of hell was going to descend upon the back of our necks. Ergo …”

  “You’re taking us through rural Alabama,” I muttered, still rubbing at the base of my spine. “Where the roads are twisting and the cameras are less plentiful.”

  “Like I said, it’s not the cameras you have to worry about,” Harry said. “It’s the watching eyes. You may be looking not quite like yourself these days, but it’s hardly a foolproof disguise.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “It certainly didn’t fool you.”

  “I do like to think I’m no fool,” Harry said, with that everlasting sense of levity he seemed to bring to everything, “but of course … we all get caught with our pants down sometimes.” He looked at me slyly out of the corner of his eye. “Or … with nothing on, maybe.”

  I was still slightly drunk, coming out of that bender, and damn if he didn’t get me to blush. The first time we’d crossed paths, Harry had knocked on my hotel door when I’d been wearing nothing but a towel. I’d thought he was Reed, so I’d answered, and in the course of events—I thought he was a villain at the time—I’d attacked him and my towel had gone kaput, leaving me properly naked and trying to kick his ass while he’d dodged my every attempt to lay a hand on him and watched me try with amusement.

  That he was reminding me of this now was … annoying. And only mildly embarrassing.

  Maybe more than mildly.

  “Don’t be an ass, Harry,” I said, trying to make it sound warning.

  “Well, I can’t help it, really,” he said, that smirk—gahhh, I should have wanted to club him, but he was—I was pretty sure—modulating his delivery to keep on my good side, and damn if it wasn’t working, even though I knew what he was doing. “I’m not really being an ass—I might be showing mine, a bit.” Here he grinned. “Surely you can identify with that.”

  Not subtle. I blushed deeper. It wasn’t like I hadn’t endured many bouts of public nudity in my life—I mean, I burned off entire wardrobes for the years I had fire powers, in public and elsewhere, before I discovered the secret of cloaking myself in it like clothing afterward. There were photos on the net. I knew it, and had made my peace with it.

  Harry was rubbing my nose in it, and I wasn’t ready to kill him. Marks to the man who could read the future for—to my complete surprise—making me smile, ever so slightly. How the hell did he do that?

  “Yeah, I can identify with that,” I said, suddenly thankful that I was sober enough to not be slurring. I let the silence hang for a moment. “So … what do you need my help with?”

  He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “It’s not time for that yet,” he said. “I’ll tell when we’re getting closer to the moment.”

  “Great,” I said dryly, “I love surprises.”

  “Of course you do,” he said.

  “I actually don’t,” I said. “I hate surprises.”

  He gave me a sidelong look, taking his eyes off the road for way, way too long. “Don’t worry,” he said smoothly. “I can read the future, remember? I could steer us all the way from here to—well, where we’re going—and never run off the road.”

  “That’s still really creepy, Harry,” I said, my nerves … well, they were fine. It took me a second, and then …

  Yeah. He could see the future. Of course it wasn’t a problem for him not to watch the road. If the car started to bump, he could correct because … he’d see it coming in his future probabilities.

  Nifty.

  “You don’t like the kind of surprises you’re regularly confronted with,” he said, looking me right in the eyes. “Villains popping up like a jack-in-the-box you never asked for. Enemies showing themselves at times you didn’t expect to see them. Governments turning on you, the press blindsiding you out of nowhere. But a normal surprise? Reed showing up when you least expect him to?” He smiled. “You like a good surprise every once in a while, Sienna Nealon. You just need to have more people in your life who give you the pleasant ones, instead of the unpleasant kind.”

  “Huh,” I said, contemplating what he’d said. “Okay. Maybe.”

  He just grinned and turned back to the road in time to bring
the car back between the lines. “You wait and see.”

  “Still,” I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye while crossing my arms and pretending to face forward, “I don’t think your need for help is going to fall into the category of ‘pleasant surprise,’ Harry.”

  “Why would you think that?” he asked. He already knew the answer, the bastard.

  “Because no one has ever asked me for help and it turned out to not be something horrific,” I said. “It’s never, ‘Hey, Sienna, help this little old lady cross the street.’ Or, ‘Babysit this lovely, charming kid who will give you no problems at all’—”

  “I don’t think you’ve done much babysitting,” Harry said.

  “I’ve watched Greg Vansen’s son Eddie on at least three occasions now,” I said. Greg and Morgan had been up to visit us twice since I’d come back from Scotland. I suspected Reed of trying to draw me out of my drinking shell. It had worked, inasmuch as I’d managed to postpone my normal five o’clock drink to after Eddie went to bed at eight. Progress, probably, by my brother’s standards. No need to mention that I hadn’t been unsupervised with Eddie during those visits. “That kid loves me.” Mostly true. I hadn’t stolen his soul, and he seemed to like to involve me in his Lego projects, even though he was much better at them than I was.

  “Duly noted.”

  “My point is, no one comes to Sienna Nealon for the easy stuff,” I said.

  “I like how you’ve gotten to the point that referring to yourself in the third person is natural.”

  “They come to me for crap no one else can solve, usually involving face punching.”

  “How’s that face punching business going lately?” Harry asked.

  “Poorly. I haven’t punched any faces in a while. My knuckles are getting soft.”

  “Well, I come with opportunity, then,” Harry said.