Now she sounded like the Scourge. “You mean take out the Hero Council?” Nefarious had tried that, and he and Ashula and the others had wound up dead. “They’ll kill you.”
She lifted her chin higher. “What alternative is there, really? Run? Hide? Hide didn’t work so well for you when you ran off to join the Renegades, did it?”
She might as well have punched me in the gut. I ground my teeth. “Fine. You’re right. They were wrong for thinking they could hide a whole community right under Portland. But we can still lie low, and have a life.”
She shook her head. “You’re fooling yourself, Mat.”
“Where are you? Let me come to you?”
“I’m listening to the song of Moss.”
“Plants are my department, remember.”
“This song anyone can hear. If they listen, really listen.”
She wasn’t making sense. “What does that mean?”
“You have to listen.”
Anger, frustration, desperation all stormed inside me. I unclenched my fingers. “Listen, whatever you’re doing, they’ll come for you. We can face this together. I can help.” I reached toward the projection.
“Take care of yourself, Mat,” she said and vanished.
My fingers closed on air. I wanted to break something. Why couldn’t she see how dangerous things were? Why couldn’t she see that?
I knelt beside Keisha. Gently shook her. Still out. Stunner hits usually lasted about fifteen minutes. I hefted her up into a fireman’s carry. She was five eight, I was six two. A big girl, Ruth used to say.
I started down the aisle, stopped, and lowered Keisha back to the floor. Stupid. I should check on those idiot gangers. Ella’s apparition, okay, projection, had messed with my thinking. I took a deep breath. Focus, I told myself.
I crept over to where the gangers were laid out. Two were dead, the others stunned. I started to reach for the stunner, stopped. No. A second stun hit when a person was already out from the first could stop a heart. These bastards probably deserved it, but I didn’t want to point at us. Not any more than I already had. Support thought we were dead, at least I hoped they did. Keisha and I had been inside the neutron bomb’s blast radius at Emerald Green. We should have died. Would have died if not for the mutant plant shell I created using the amplifier, to shield us from the blast and the neutron radiation.
I could kill the unconscious gangers with one of the pistols, make it look like a gang fight.
Instead, I went back to Keisha, hefted her up again, and staggered out of the sanctuary.
2
The wind buffeted the old beater van as I drove through streets strewn with fallen trees and branches. The power was out in whole neighborhoods.
Keisha groaned in the passenger seat, opened her eyes and looked around, wincing.
“What the hell happened?”
My brain raced. How much did I tell her? I kept my eyes on the dark street ahead of me. I slowed to drive around a fallen maple tree. My sense brushed it, the tree had fallen due to rot needing only a gentle push from the wind. It was silent. The other trees, shrubs, and bushes lining the street screamed. I walled off my sense again as much as I could.
“The gangers had a stunner.”
“Figures. Fuckers.” She pulled herself up. “I take it you won. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her staring at me. “They had the drop on us, Mat. How did you beat them?”
“Got lucky.” I sucked at lying. But if I told Keisha Ella’s projection had defeated them, she’d want to know what happened next. And I’d have to lie about it.
Keisha’s eyebrows shot up. “You aren’t that lucky.”
I shrugged. She lay back in her seat, closed her eyes.
I got to 82nd. The power was still on there, and I drove over to our fleabag motel, just a few blocks off the avenue. I parked the van.
The wind had dropped from hurricane to just freaking gusty. Keisha shook herself and sat up. “What happened, Mat? Really? We were in deep shit, cornered like that. They had guns, right? Of course they did. There was that freaking huge tree, but even you couldn’t turn that into a weapon, not fast enough. Not with them having the drop on us.” Her words tumbled out in a rush.
I looked at her for a moment before answering. She was wound up. “I summoned blackberry vines from below.”
She nodded. “Figures. But that isn’t going to stop, what, six, seven armed gangers, not before they shot or stunned you.”
“I managed to use cover.”
“Really?” Her eyes gave me that “see-through-Mat’s-bullshit-look” Keisha was so good at.
“I had help, okay?”
She squinted at me. “Why the big secret, then? And whose fricking help?”
I turned in my seat to face her. “Ella’s. Okay? Her apparition, projection, whatever. It showed up, right before the power went out. The goons shot and stunned each other as she danced around in the dark. She stunned a few of them.”
A cold thought came to me. I didn’t know for certain that Ella’s projection hadn’t picked up a pistol and shot a ganger. That was the death penalty for an Empowered. God, but she should know that. Schools taught it. But I hadn’t had the time to thoroughly check the bodies. Even if I had, I wasn’t good at that kind of stuff.
Keisha blinked. “Whoa. So, we are headed to where she is?” Her faced turned sour. “And why the hell didn’t you tell me as soon as I came back from stunner-ville?”
I swallowed slowly. “She told me to stop looking for her. To take care of myself.” My chest was suddenly heavy. “Told me to let her do what she needed to do.” There, it was out. I waited for Keisha to tell me that was it. Time to do something else.
“You did tell her to get her sorry ass back here, right?”
My stomach fluttered. My smile felt crooked. “Not like that, but I tried.”
Keisha shook her head. “Just as thick-headed as her big sister.”
“Funny,” I retorted, but my smile widened into a stupid grin. Keisha didn’t want to stop
“Really? You both are stubborn as mules.” She stretched. “So, did she give you any clues about how to find her?”
I shrugged. ““Just said something about listening to the song of moss, whatever the hell that is.”
Keisha cocked her head to one side. “Maybe she’s talking about your plant power?”
“No, that can’t be it.”
Her faced clouded. “Why not?”
“There was something about the song of moss written on the whiteboard in the fellowship hall, remember?” I asked.
“Yeah, and maybe that’s about you, too.”
I shook my head. “That’s no clue if that’s all it is.”
She didn’t answer and I snorted.
“Come on, let’s get some food,” I said.
She perked up at that. “You think restaurants are open now?”
“I mean insta-meals. We need to keep low.”
“Shit, that isn’t food.” She made a face. “I’d settle for breakfast-for-dinner at the greasiest greasy spoon you could find over that freeze-dried crap.”
“It’s what we have,” I said.
I got out of the van. The wind had stopped. I looked up, and saw stars shining through a hole in the clouds.
Keisha followed me to our motel room. It was on the second floor at the far end of the farthest building. The motel was cinder block painted brown. Place was a dump, but we could afford it, and the operator didn’t ask questions.
Our room stank of old cigarettes. So much for smoke-free. But, I wouldn’t let Keisha open the windows. I didn’t want anyone to overhear us. She complained when we went inside, just like she always did when we returned to our room. Just like always, I forced myself to ignore her. I wanted so bad to air out the room.
I went over to the little sink.
I pulled a couple of insta-meals out of the little cupboard over the tiny sink. “Chicken or steak?” I asked her.
“Neither of those is w
hat they say on the box.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but flavored.”
“Steak, I guess.” She suddenly sounded tired. She sat in the chair next to the window, next to a little end table. “What do we do now?”
“Eat.” I pulled the tab on the steak box, felt it warm up.
Normally Keisha would make a face, or raise a fist when I made a crack like that, but not this time. She rubbed at her eyes.
“I mean about your sister. If she doesn’t want to come home, what do we do?”
I pulled back the cover of the meal, stirred it with a plastic fork. Keisha had hit the problem square in the head. How would we get Ella to come home if she didn’t want to? I took a breath. There had to be a way. “We find her, and bring her back.”
Keisha shrugged. “But you said she said she didn’t want to come home.”
“She’s an idiot.” I put Keisha’s insta-meal on the table, fork sticking out of it.
“Aren’t you supposed to say Bon Appetit, or some shit like that?” Keisha mumbled. She picked at the food. “I am so tired of this pre-made crap.”
I was sick of insta-meals, too, but I wasn’t about to agree. She’d just use that to argue we should go to a restaurant, or try and find a better place, like a hotel instead of a roach motel. But we couldn’t be sure Support wasn’t looking for us, or that the Portland police didn’t have us on some wanted list.
I pulled the tab on my chicken meal. Keisha chewed her food. Made a face, glanced at me. “Still tastes like shit,” she said around a mouthful.
“That shit’ll feed you.”
She made a face. “That’s my line, girl.”
“So I stole it.”
I took my meal to my bed, sat at the front, near Keisha, started eating.
Keisha didn’t know I’d worked for Support. She’d probably kill me at least twice if she knew I’d worked for the men and women in black suits. Not that I’d had much of a choice, not if I wanted my grandmother to stay alive. Support provided her, through some kind of funky grant scheme, with a very experimental drug to help her fight the Thalik’s disease that was slowly killing her. They also got my sisters into a real good school, and the three of them out of the felony flats apartment complex they’d been living in and into a decent house.
But Keisha probably wouldn’t see it that way. We’d been in the Scourge together, and I’d led our cell after killing that asshole Mutter and stopping him from destroying Seattle. But she’d see my secretly being an infiltrator as being a backstabbing traitor.
A knock on the door made me and Keisha both jump. I put down my insta-meal on the bed and went to look through the peephole.
A scruffy looking dude in a gray hoodie slouched outside. Strands of hair stuck out of the hoodie.
My breath froze.
Alexander Sanchez. Support agent.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Who is it?” Keisha whispered.
Shit. I forced myself to look annoyed. “How the hell did stoner dude find us?”
She shot to her feet, face suddenly wary. “That loser leech that used to live next door to us?”
I nodded. I had to play this carefully, or else things would turn bloody fast.
How had he found us? Did this mean Support knew we were alive? Were Winterfield and a bunch of other agents outside? But if that were the case, why not just kick the door in? Where the hell was the Hero Council if they knew we were alive?
“What does he want?” Keisha said, her voice low and threatening.
“What the hell do you think? Money.” I made my voice sound disgusted.
“But how the fuck did he find us?”
I swallowed. “Come on! We’ve been asking questions at bus stations, homeless shelters, you name it. He probably heard we were around, and decided to look us up.”
“But here? In this dump?” She asked in disbelief. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Okay, I snuck into the old place a few weeks ago.”
“What?”
The knock again. Alex wasn’t going away. Shit. My heart began pounding. I took a deep breath. “All right, so I fucked up. I was looking for something I’d left behind.”
“But we agreed not to go back. Why did you lie to me?” She was right, I sucked at lying.
“This is my fault,” I said.
“Damn right.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I continued. I held up a hand. “Really.”
She shook her head. “You’d better.”
I unlatched the door chain, unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped outside.
“Hey, Mat,” Alex said, in that lazy grunge dude voice he used when he played that role.
My heart wouldn’t stop pounding. I closed the door behind me, grabbed his arm, and tugged him after me.
“Good to see you, too,” he said, suddenly sounding like Alex. Even with the grunge look and the beard growth, he was a handsome man. He didn’t stink, either. The man had his limits as to how far he’d take a role.
I kept my mouth shut. I scanned the parking lot, looking for new cars, crouched figures. Nothing. My skin didn’t tingle either, which meant no new Empowered in the vicinity. Just a faint familiar tingle from Keisha, which faded as I marched Alex and me down the stairs and to a quiet, dark corner by the dumpsters. It stank, but I had good lines of sight.
I held my arms low, fists clenched. Spiky weeds grew up from a crack in the chipped concrete block the dumpster was on. The weeds trembled in my mind. I began growing them, stopped. I couldn’t just react.
“Why are you here?” I demanded in a low voice.
Alex shook his head. “Maybe because I’m worried about you.”
“Does Support know I’m alive?” My mouth turned dry at the thought.
“No.”
No? I was confused. “But you knew I lived.”
He stepped closer, and suddenly his warmth filled my senses. I had no time for this. He was handsome, a nice guy, at least as far a Support agent went. I didn’t have any time for guys, hadn’t for forever, especially handsome, nice ones like Alex that made me feel warm.
His eyes were sad. “I thought you and Keisha had been killed when the neutron bomb detonated at Emerald Green.”
“We should have been.” It had happened in the blink of an eye. I couldn’t do it again if I tried. The amplifier had been turned into a smoking wreck, overloaded by me pushing my power beyond my limits.
“When we swept the site, in hazmat gear, I discovered a few shards of a plant derived substance that wasn’t radioactive. It disintegrated as I examined it.”
The shell.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone else?”
His gaze locked with mine. Sadness, and maybe some shame, too, were in those brown eyes.
“I couldn’t.” He paused, like he was thinking over what he wanted to say next. “I—I wasn’t sure you were alive at first.”
“But you figured it out,” I pressed. “You should’ve told them at that point.” I didn’t get it. Yeah, it kept them off my back, but it made me super suspicious. Like perhaps he lied and was actually reporting to them, that they really knew, and just wanted to continue using me.
My chest grew tight, and I gave him a hard stare.
“They really think Keisha and me are dead?”
He didn’t blink, didn’t flinch in the face of my glare. “They do.”
“So, why are you keeping things from them?” I probably should have kept my mouth shut. “And how’re you keeping it from them?”
He looked at his hands. “I’m on extended leave. I had time coming. In fact, Support requires agents to take a few months off every two years. I was overdue.” A muscle in his neck moved. “I wanted to make sure you’re safe. Alive. Actually happy even.”
I swallowed. The whole idea was a joke—me being happy. Being happy wasn’t part of my life, hadn’t been since the Hero Council had killed my friends when they took down the Renegades. Yeah, there were times when life felt like happy, but
those were just pretend. I couldn’t be happy. Happy made you weak. Worse, happy lied to you. Because things weren’t happy. Ruth was sick. My sisters needed help, and a secretive government agency wanted me serving them for always.
And if they didn’t want me, that left me looking at a lifetime in Special Corrections. I sure as Hell didn’t want to put on the blue jump suit and be one of the so-called good guys in the Hero Council, who were really just sanctioned goons trying to keep everyone else in line.
I didn’t want to be a criminal. What I really wanted was to just live my life, be normal, but that sure as shit wasn’t going to happen.
Alex looked like he wanted to say something more, but he didn’t.
“Are you going to tell Support now?”
He shook his head. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t want you being on the run.”
“That’s only a problem if they stop thinking I’m dead.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Really? Because it looks to be a big problem right now. You’ve been grilling me about why I wouldn’t tell them.” He straightened his shoulders. “I want you to come back with me to Support, so you can be safe.”
I laughed then, a hard laugh, no humor in it as far as I was concerned. “That’s your idea of being safe.”
“It is. I want to help you bring in your sister, too.”
My skin went cold. I was an idiot. Of course he knew about Ella. “I want to find Ella to prevent that,” I said.
Concerned creased his face. “But if you don’t, if she doesn’t choose to either foreswear or join the Hero Council, she’ll be deemed a rogue Empowered. You know that.”
I clenched my fists. “Not if we go someplace to hide.”
“Where?”
That stopped me cold, like he’d hit me with an ice brick. I leaned back, closed my eyes. I hadn’t thought past trying to find her. She was hiding right now, just like I had with the Renegades.
“I don’t want Zhukova getting her claws on my sister,” I said through gritted teeth. “I don’t want them nailing Keisha, either.” I closed my eyes, raised a hand. “Okay, fine, so you are right about choices.”
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