Apex

by Robert J. Crane

  “Hm,” I muttered to myself, enjoying the quiet for once. Eilish was staring out the window, a look of barely veiled awe on her face as we drove through endless, flat fields. Cassidy was still tapping away at the keyboard, having not said anything for a long while, and Harry …

  Harry was in the passenger seat. He shifted, trying to put his head against the window in a way that was comfortable (I assumed, having gone through the same thing only hours earlier) and failing.

  “Trouble sleeping?” I asked as he shifted again and made another sound of displeasure.

  “Now that you mention it … yes,” he said, arms folded tightly in front of him.

  “Guilty conscience?” I asked with a little bit of a prickly, taunting air.

  “My conscience is perfectly fine, thanks for asking,” he said. “I think it has more to do with this uncomfortable car.”

  “Yeah, I guess windows weren’t made to be great pillows,” I said. “I just figured you had something on your mind that you’d yet to hit me with. Some super insight from the future or about my past that you were just waiting to—y’know, knock the pegs out from under me with in a little while. Keep me off balance.”

  “I think you’re plenty unbalanced as it is.” He was smirking again. The bastard.

  “Haha,” I said, with no actual humor. “You have to admit, if you were being honest, that you don’t exactly seem like you’re making a great effort not to knock me flat in this whole business.”

  “Lots of people make a lot more effort than I do to actually knock you over,” he said. “And whether you want to believe it or not, Sienna … I’m on your side in this. And I am trying to help you.”

  I burned a little within. “Fine. Okay.” I let it go, because … well, annoyingly, I actually did sort of believe he was trying to help me. Frustrating as I found him.

  “The future is in flux right now,” Harry said, trying to stretch his neck. “The near future, I mean. And, actually, the far future, too. Consequences are coming, with the chance to ripple through … well … with a chance for a long rippling effect.” He rubbed his forehead. “The problem is, there’s so much going on it’s like sensory overload. So many things are happening. It’s overwhelming.”

  “Does that happen often?” I asked.

  “Not really, no,” Harry said, rubbing his face, shading his eyes from the sun—and from me. “Not when I’m just walking around living life.”

  “What are you doing now, if not walking around and living life?” I asked. “Trying to sleep and occasionally eat and—whatever else you do. Drink and gamble, I guess?”

  “I do like to drink and gamble some,” he said with a nod. “But I’m not living life right this minute, Sienna.” He still didn’t look at me. “I’m trying to keep an eye on the future.”

  I frowned, turning the wheel to move us back into the right lane in order to let a BMW doing about 90 zoom past. “But you can’t see your own future.”

  He paused, hand still over his eyes. “No.”

  “So …” I pursed my lips. “Whose future are you looking into?” He didn’t stir. “Mine?”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, and it was a slow exhalation of air that followed his words.

  “Is there sex in my future?” I asked, white-knuckling the wheel. “Because it feels like there should be sex in my future. It’s kinda been a while.”

  Harry let out a little chuckle. “Yes, Sienna, there is sex in your future.”

  I stared straight ahead and reddened a little. Whew. Hopefully it’d pair well with that happiness he’d promised me earlier. “Good.”

  “What about mine?” Eilish asked, leaning forward in the back seat. “Is there sex in my future?”

  Harry seemed to think about it for a moment. “Not anytime soon.” He tilted his head to look back at her, faint smile perking the corner of his lips. “Guess you’re probably sorry you passed up on that orgy opportunity now, huh?”

  “You’re just a second-rate fortune teller,” Eilish said, slumping back in the seat and doing a little blushing of her own. “I could get my rocks off if I wanted to. You don’t know.”

  “And that’s the point of my powers,” Harry said. “Probabilities change. I can see a certain spectrum of them, but it doesn’t mean some wild-ass, out-of-left-field shit doesn’t show up at the last minute and change everything. I’ve been blindsided by wacky, unbelievable things I didn’t see coming more than a few times.”

  “But I thought you could at least see those wild probabilities?” I asked.

  “I can—sorta,” Harry said. “It’s like …” He blinked, apparently trying to find the right analogy. “I don’t know … the big ones dominate the scene—it’s like a landscape. I might not see that tiny shrub in the background until I get closer, you know? Because the lake view is commanding my attention, and past it, that forest edging up on the foreground. So I miss the bush in the background.”

  “Way to come through with the Bob Ross explanation of your powers,” I said. “You don’t have to tell anyone about that shrub; it can be your little secret.”

  “I have no idea who Bob Ross is,” Eilish said.

  “Anyway …” Harry said. “That’s how it works.”

  “I would have figured you’d see it all,” I said, like someone had let a little of the air out of my balloon. “Like … seeing the future would give you some sense of warm certainty.” I glanced at him, head now back against the window again. “I figured you’d sleep like a baby.”

  “I think sleeplessness is worse for a Cassandra,” Harry said.

  “But … you know how it’s most likely to turn out,” I said. “So … shouldn’t that eliminate the fear? Knowing that—in the end—it’ll all be all right?”

  “There’s always fear, Sienna,” he said, “because I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, exactly. I just know the clearest probabilities, and they get narrower and narrower until there’s only one left. And yes, I can sometimes see beyond to the big events, the ones that shake the world—or redefine it, but … that’s not the end, usually.” His smile was quicksilver, it appeared so quickly and then lost all its joy just as fast. “We don’t end until we die, after all.”

  “That’s … so very glum,” Eilish said.

  “But … that’s why there’s always fear,” Harry said. “Because there’s always another trouble coming until the end.” His eyes glinted, then widened. “Sienna—”

  “Whoa,” Cassidy said, and somehow I knew that whatever Harry had been about to say had been related to Cassidy’s sudden outburst.

  “What is it?” I asked, watching Harry’s jaw lock out of the corner of my eye. Uh oh.

  “Looks like our enemy just showed up in Minneapolis,” Cassidy said as we crested a small hill that looked out over what appeared to be hundreds of miles of Illinois. She thrust her laptop forward, and I was treated to a view of a picture that looked like airport tarmac, with a burning plane in the background, orange flames and white snow, brown grass exposed where the heat had melted the snow away.

  “Jeez,” I muttered. “Is Reed on scene yet?”

  There was silence, just for a second, and I realized Cassidy had stopped talking.

  Before I could turn and see what the problem was, I felt Harry’s hand on the wheel, guiding it, and I stared at him blankly for just a second before it hit me.

  Reed.

  He was …

  “No,” I whispered, and I took my hands off the wheel. “Not …” I looked at the laptop screen, and there were … bodies … arranged around the tarmac like— “No,” I said again. “They can’t be—”

  But with damning certainty, I stared at it as Harry guided the wheel toward the side of the road, and we drifted to a stop, my foot off the pedal, my ability to do anything but stare at the picture of my fallen friends, shadows on the tarmac, as we coasted to a stop on the side of the freeway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Idon’t think anyone is dead,” Cassidy said, “b
ut I can’t be sure. I’m getting the MSP airport police radio transcripts in real time, and—they haven’t called for a coroner or anything. Of course, that could be coming …”

  Normally, I might have wanted to kill Cassidy for delivering this kind of news in a such a chipper tone of voice, but now I was hanging onto her words like a lifeline, trying to catch anything she threw my way, any factoid, any tiny data point—whatever I could get I would take, like a hungry puppy begging for table scraps.

  “Here,” Harry said, and he shifted the SUV into park. I hadn’t even realized we’d come to a complete stop, my foot on the brake pedal.

  Cars whizzed by us at 70 and higher. The SUV shook in their wake every time one passed.

  “Do you know for sure that no one is dead?” I asked, even though I knew she’d just answered it. My brain felt like molasses, like it was moving in slow motion, trying to come to grips with this meteor strike of information and emotion. My hands were shaking on the wheel, wrists fluttering back and forth like a rope bridge on a gusty day.

  “No, and I wouldn’t even know this much if not for the fact that the entire emergency response for Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington and the surrounding areas just exploded into action,” Cassidy said, face lit by the screen’s glow. “Apparently the governor was there when it happened, and now everyone’s freaked out that this was an assassination attempt or something.”

  “It was,” I whispered. But it wasn’t targeted at the governor, and we didn’t know if it had succeeded yet.

  “Sienna …” Harry said.

  I turned on him, slowly. “Did you see this coming?”

  He shook his head. He was pale like the snows that lay draped, unevenly, over the snowy Illinois plains. “No.”

  I looked him in the eye. “I believe you.”

  He didn’t exactly let out a breath of relief, but I could see a slight loosening of his features. “Good.”

  “Emergency services are going to be working for a while,” Cassidy said. “They’re calling in more ambulances.” She was still in tight concentration.

  “That’s … that’s a good thing, right?” Eilish asked. “They don’t call in ambulances for dead people, after all.”

  “Yeah,” I said, opening my door as frosty air rushed in. “What wonderful news.” I slammed it behind me and stalked around the hood of the car, heading for the limited treeline to my right. It consisted of five pines all in a row, the tallest of which was only about ten feet, and it sat just in front of a three-wire cattle fence.

  I didn’t even have a proper woods to stalk off into to gather my thoughts. Illinois. The southern and western part was like Iowa lite.

  I half-expected to hear a door open behind me, but I didn’t, and when I reached the fence I just jumped it. Nothing too fancy, a simple meta leap about five feet over a four-foot fence. I landed in the patchy snow on the other side and almost turned my ankle.

  Color me unworried. Even if I turned my ankle, a minor injury like that would heal in about two hours, even in my vanilla condition.

  “Dammit,” I let out a breath, and it frosted in front of me. I couldn’t tell if the worry I was feeling bubbling inside was driving the anger, or the anger was driving the worry harder. It didn’t really matter either way, because they were both present in sufficient quantities to choke me, and all I was doing was keeping my cool until I felt like I was far enough away from the SUV to lose it without having to worry about being watched.

  But the ground was flat all the way around me, so there wasn’t much hope I wouldn’t be seen. No, there was nowhere to hide now; I was in plain sight of the road anywhere I went.

  The despair and uncertainty felt like it was choking me, a little extra discomfort to compete with the chilling air that seeped in around my long sleeves and jeans. I should have dressed more warmly, knowing I was heading north, but here I was in the middle of snowy field, wearing no coat and watching my breath mist in front of me.

  And lucky me, I got to wonder if my brother and my friends were dead on some cold, snowy runway in Minneapolis.

  They’d come to save me in Scotland, and now I had to wonder if I’d missed my chance to repay the favor. They’d gone through all that hell, come to pull my fat out of the fire only for me to be too pathetic and drunk and unconcerned with everything to worry when they went into the fire themselves.

  “I don’t think they’re dead,” Cassidy said from behind me. I turned to find her picking her way across the gaps where no snow lay, patches of black earth that were fallow for winter, hard and unyielding against her little tennis shoes. She had wrapped her arms around herself and was shivering, her tiny frame covered by a heavy coat, one more appropriate for Minneapolis weather. I wondered, idly, if she’d set up shop there again, or if she’d picked some other place to park herself after Reed destroyed her house in Richfield.

  “It’d be a lot more helpful to me if I knew—and if I knew how badly they were injured,” I said, turning back to her. I paused, and said, “Wait … Harry sent you to talk to me? You?”

  “I don’t know why, either,” Cassidy said, shivering. “It’s so cold out here, and it feels like I could be doing more at the computer, but …” she shrugged her small shoulders. “Yes, he sent me. Said I needed to come talk to you.” She almost missed a step but caught herself at the last second. She was not the most graceful meta I’d seen; in fact, she wasn’t that far off from being human in her dexterity. “Said I was the only one who could come talk to you.”

  “I wonder why that is,” I said, turning back to look at the horizon, at where the grey sky joined the flat earth.

  “Hell if I know,” she said, shivering as she slipped up next to me. “I think we both know my people skills are still …”

  “As weak as your deadlift,” I said. “Weaker, probably, since you still have meta strength.”

  “I never understood the point of physical strength until I ran across you,” she said, cocking her head, breath still misting the air. “Eric and I, we could … I mean, he used some variant of physical strength, obviously, but … it wasn’t like he had to get violent with people. We cracked bank vaults with his powers, and always when they were unoccupied. It was easy, it was lucrative, and we could just … live in the times between. Live on what we’d taken. Physical strength was about threats, about violence, about compulsion through force. I liked … to outthink my opponents instead.” A trace of a smile appeared on her lips. “To present them with a circumstance so ingenious that violence was an afterthought. Persuasion by manipulation of circumstance, call it. They never even needed to know my hand had been involved in … whatever it was. I could get what I needed without being so coarse.

  “Then you came along,” she said, “and suddenly … all the thought in the world, all the avoidance—none of it mattered. You wouldn’t stop coming. You caught Eric, and I needed actual physical strength to overcome you. So I thought it through. I brought in people skilled at that sort of thing, people who had lived by violence. I removed most of your ability to do violence through the use of the suppressant—”

  “Oh, yeah?” I remembered what she was talking about, her jailbreak at the old Agency, back when I’d worked for the government and been the warden for their prison, the Cube, which was housed under our headquarters. She’d done it, too, orchestrated a hostage situation to cover up Eric Simmons’s escape, used metahuman Russian ex-Special Forces operators to lay siege to us during a big event and depowered my brother. Then she’d had her little team hound me throughout the facility while I Die-Harded my way through them in order to keep the jailbreak contained.

  And it mostly was. Only Simmons and Anselmo Serafini had escaped, and Anselmo had had to be carried out, scarred beyond recognition, thanks to me.

  “—and you still wrecked everything and saved the day—mostly.” She made a face. “Violence. You were a master of it. You killed almost every one of those Russian mercs with less power than you have now.”

  “I had some hel
p,” I said quietly. “Reed. J.J. Scott … eventually.”

  “I don’t get it, though,” Cassidy said. “I mean, I know Scotland was tough on you and all, but … you’re not dead. And like I said, you’re more powerful now than you were when you fought through those Russians—”

  “I knew who I was then,” I said, the truth crashing in on me—several at once, actually.

  My brother could die.

  I’d lost my way, because not only had I lost my power and my memory, but …

  This thing I’d been doing the last few years? Helping people? Fighting the bad guys?

  I’d done it under the auspices of being a fugitive for the last year, which hobbled me.

  But I’d also done it with incredible, near-limitless amounts of money available to me, and the power of flight to guarantee I could escape just about any situation that got too dicey. I’d turned tail and run a few times, and when I wanted to stand and fight, I had lots of power to do that as well.

  Now?

  I was standing in the middle of a field with the ability to punch, with a Walther PPK in my waistband, and the power to suck souls if someone held contact with my skin long enough.

  It was hardly nothing, but it also wasn’t the power to fly, to throw fire in any direction, to cast webs of light that could net people up like a holy Spider-man, to throw fear and paralysis into their minds, or, failing that, heal from just about any wound they could inflict or turn into a four-story dragon and rip them apart with my teeth.

  I let out a long sigh.

  “Why the hell did Harry send me out here to talk to you?” Cassidy asked. “I lack the soft skills for this. I mean, can you imagine a person less interested in feelings than me?”

  “You’re less interested in the feelings of others, Cassidy,” I said, “I’m pretty sure you have your own, since I’ve been on the receiving end of your ire before.”