“No,” I said. “And I definitely have not ever walked in on two villains...in the middle of it.” I ignored his soft chortling at my discomfiture. “I don't know, it short circuited my brain.”
Jamal blinked. “'Short circuited'...it was just two people having at it. Come on, this is a thing that happens every day.”
“Not live and in front of me,” I snapped. “I don't know; I got caught between the polite social convention of being embarrassed for them and needing to arrest them.” I could feel my cheeks burning, so I covered my face again. “I know I seem super jaded, and I've definitely seen a lot, but that was new. And I froze.” I shook my head. “Won't happen again.”
“Well, I mean, what's the likelihood of you walking in on villains in the middle of the act in the future?”
“If I live a full life? Probably pretty good,” I said resignedly, turning my attention back to the ambulance. “The truth is...I couldn't even tell you what it is that made me freeze.”
“I could probably tell you,” Jamal said. “You're kind of a prude.” He must have caught a devil glare from me. “In the best possible way.”
“There are literally photos of my ass on the internet.”
“Not because you posed for a shoot,” Jamal said, chuckling under his breath. “Because you got naked in the course of saving lives and stopping bad guys. It ain't like you're some Instaphoto e-thot.” He must have mistaken my stare for curiosity, because he said, “'Thot' means–”
“'That ho over there,'” I finished for him. “I know the internet. Maybe not as well as you do, but it's where I live during my considerable off time.”
He chuckled again. “I guess so. Anyway, it's not like you're that.”
“Glad we got that straight,” I said, shaking off our conversation like the layer of ash that seemed to be accumulating on me from the fires raging all around. Someone had offered me a HAZMAT suit and a mask. As if lung cancer was a real risk for a meta. I started across the field toward Scott and Augustus. Jamal trailed behind me, keeping his thoughts about my prudishness or whatever else to himself.
When I reached Scott, I felt really bad for him. I hadn't seen him up close, but his chest and neck were blistered, round spots of bubbled skin covering his upper torso. He was sitting on the stretcher as I approached, and looked at me through half-closed eyes.
“Hey,” I said gently, afraid to touch him lest I hurt the poor guy. “How are you feeling?” I ran the back of my hand over my brow and it came back ashy.
Scott stared at me through half-closed eyes. “Not much worse than you look – Sienna, have you seen yourself?”
I self-consciously stroked my hair, which was bushy and wild in a manner even beyond its usual untamable spirit. “I might have taken some stray voltage.”
“Your face is covered in ash, too,” he said, shaking his head and looking away, like the spectacle of me was just too much for his sensibilities at the moment.
“I'll give it a wash when I get to a hotel.”
“And there are holes in your clothes. Epic numbers of them.”
“Thanks. I–”
“Also, you're not wearing a bra, and it's obvious because of the holes.”
I looked down; the closest hole in my shirt to any boobage was on the far right side. I was covered better than any sunbather at the beach, and I wasn't even nipping out. Not in this sweltering heat. “Whatever, man. The underwire conducted electricity and set the cloth on fire.”
He stared at me. “Why do these things always happen to you?”
“Hazard of the game, my friend,” I said.
He shook his head. “We go on missions all the time. Usually we get dumb criminals who go down easy when you're not around. But put you on a mission and suddenly it's supervillains all the way down.”
“Hey, I'm not the one who stumbled into the case of the real estate developer that hired an invisible man to do his dirty work because he wanted to blow up LA.”
“That...that's true,” Scott said, cracking a smile. It vanished in short order, though. “It is good to have you back. Would have been a lot tougher tackling this one without you.”
“So far all I've done is chase a skinny succubus and take the leg off a punk rocker,” I said. “Oh, and watch extremely amateur live-action porn.”
Scott's eyebrows arched up. “...Huh?”
“Never mind.” I patted him on the shoulder. “How long do you think it'll take you to recover from this?”
He winced. “A day. Maybe a little more.” He shifted on the gurney. “They want to take me to the hospital. Fluids and quiet rest might help speed things along.”
“You should go,” I said. “I had them take Reed.”
He nodded slowly. “You going to be okay? Without us, I mean?”
“If anything major happens,” I said, giving him a wink, “we'll be sure to break you out before we go charging off.”
“That's probably about the best compliment I've gotten in a while,” he said as an EMT started to wheel him away. I watched him go sadly, wondering how many more hard hits my friends would take before we put these villains down for good.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
“We don't have any camera footage to go on,” Gabriel said, pacing in front of the screens of the Texas DPS HQ. The video was tuned to footage of the Vaquero disaster, and Augustus, Jamal, and I were all scattered around the table; the two of them were seated in chairs, I was sitting on the table itself. I kept getting stray looks from Augustus, who would then quickly look away, and it took me a few minutes to realize it was because there were holes in the cloth in the back of my pants. So three or four quarter-sized portions of my ass cheeks were resting directly on the table.
He didn't say anything, I didn't say anything. Maybe it went back to me being a prude and everyone knowing it and being too polite to say, but I quickly borrowed a Texas DPS jacket and tied it around my waist.
“I might be able to scrounge you up something,” Jamal said, working his laptop furiously. “It'll be low resolution, probably, and at a distance, but there had to be a camera somewhere that caught them.”
“Vaquero's security monitors were offline,” Gabriel said. He was cradling his cowboy hat in front of his chest like a shield, or a baby. “Might have been something to do with the electrical surge in the control room later, or it could just be damage from the attack in general. Techs are working on trying to access backups, but so far, they say it doesn't look good. Unless you consider fried 'good.'”
“If it's chicken, yes,” I said, arms folded across my chest. “If it's computer systems...not so much.”
“This kinda leaves us at zero for finding these folks, though,” Augustus said, tapping a finger slowly on the table.
“It was a decisive battle, at least,” I said. “We have the corpse of the guy you sliced in half to work with.” I looked to Gabriel. “Any luck with that?”
“We're running prints. Should be back shortly, if he's got priors or is in the system. DNA and dental records are going in, too, but they'll take longer.”
“If we can ID him, maybe we can track him back to his friends,” I said. “Besides...in the war of attrition, you clobbered the crap out of one of them, killed another, and I claimed a leg. Next time I see Punk Rock Chick, she better be hobbling on a wooden peg or I'm going to feel like I failed in my competition with you. You really outdid yourself.”
“About that.” Augustus pursed his lips. “I'm pretty positive that succubus absorbed the plasma dude before he died.”
I stared at him. “How positive?”
“She blew up that last tank with plasma powers shot from her own hand,” Augustus said. “And had lined up to kill me and Scotty with them before I punted her ass.”
“Ugh.” I cringed. “An unleashed succubus. Is there anything worse?”
“An unleashed succubus with an attitude?” Jamal said, hand against the side of his computer with electricity flashing between them. He wasn't even bothering to type.
“And clothing that's so tattered it looks like it's been through three wars?”
“I don't have a change of clothes and it's really difficult to find something in my size,” I huffed. “Stupid women's clothing with their weird and incoherent sizing model. Why can't a 12 just be a 12, like it is for guys?” I cut myself off from what would have become a much longer rant. “Gabe, did anyone see which direction our bad guy flew off in?”
Gabriel shrugged. “He went up through the smoke and vanished, so...no. Radar didn't pick him up, either.”
“Damn,” I muttered, staring at the screens, the realization slamming down on me hard. “We've got nothing.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Scout
“How are you feeling?” Scout asked, cringing at the sight of Francine's wound. It was scorched black, cauterized. But bone was already starting to protrude from the wound, as though it were regrowing what was lost.
Francine looked at her with pure spite and anger, teeth gritted tightly together. “How do you think it feels?”
“Let's just give Francine a little space,” Isaac said, draping a hand over Scout's shoulder. “She's got a tough night ahead of her. Probably a tough day tomorrow, too.” He favored her with his best sympathetic smile, and Scout watched, mesmerized. “You want us to leave you be?”
“No!” Francine was leaned against a tree, and she pounded the nearest root hard enough that bark chipped off. “I want this to be over.”
“I understand,” Isaac said. They were about a hundred miles outside Houston, having grabbed a fence post and traveled swiftly across stormy skies in the northeast. Isaac had said it would give them cover. But now a peal of thunder cracked in the distance, and moisture filled the air, and Scout wasn't so sure. “It's got to be incredibly painful.”
“I don't even know how she took my leg off,” Francine said between gasps. “I didn't see. Was it ice? That light stuff she threw?” She shook her head, big beads of perspiration dripping down her face, her mascara already smeared.
Isaac just shook his head. “Doesn't matter. It'll grow back, but it's going to hurt. Pain is a sacrifice we make for the cause.” He paused. “Losing AJ, though. And the AK...” He shook his head. “That's going to have more permanent consequences.”
Right here, man, AJ said.
“He's still here,” Scout said.
Isaac glanced at her. “Oh, of course. I didn't meant it like...” He smiled tightly. “I just meant that things are easier with more people. More eyes to watch our backs, you know? Like you were doing for AJ.”
“How...did they get there that fast?” Francine asked, seemingly out of nowhere. She thumped her hand against the tree root again, loudly, and the knock reverberated through the wooded area. “We left them in North Dakota without a clue!”
“Only thing I can figure is that someone saw us flying south and tipped them off,” Isaac said, stroking his chin. “The good news...is that we mostly accomplished our mission.” Now he smiled unreservedly. “We just shut down the Houston Ship Channel, probably for months, and took a huge refinery out of commission, too. Not bad for a day's work.”
Francine just moaned, and a little spark flashed in her eyes. “What...what do we do next?”
Isaac seemed buried in thought. “Well, the original plan had some flexibility here. Lots of refineries up and down the Gulf Coast that are just ripe for the picking.”
Whoa, man, AJ said. Those suckers are going to be under heavy guard now.
“AJ says they're going to increase the guard at the refineries,” Scout said.
Isaac blinked, as if surprised to hear from AJ from beyond the grave. “That's true. But if we want to keep up our mission–”
This isn't supposed to be a suicide mission, AJ said. There are other ways to help the cause.
“We should do something different,” Scout said. “Change it up.”
Francine stared at her, breathing hard. “What...what do you mean?”
“Scout,” Isaac said, “we have a plan–”
To hell with the plan, AJ said. Your plan just got me killed!
But she took a more moderate tack. “We're at war with fossil fuel companies, right?” Scout began to pace, feeling a twitch of nervous energy. “They're hardly the only offenders that are causing climate change.”
“True,” Francine said.
“I think we should stay on target here,” Isaac said. “We want to do maximum good–”
You should hit the consumers of the fossil fuels, AJ said. There are auto manufacturing plants all through the South.
“There are auto plants we could hit,” Scout said, stopping her pacing, standing ramrod straight. She turned, slowly, to find Francine staring at her. “They use the gasoline. They put the carbon in the air. Imagine if we could take a plant out, take ten thousand, twenty thousand cars off the road in the next year?”
“I dig it,” Francine said.
Isaac hesitated. “Well...maybe.”
“It'd do good,” Scout said, feeling her breath coming in a rush, excitement infusing her. “This is what we're about. Plus it'd throw everyone off, right? Keep them guessing. It'd let us leave the Gulf Coast, make them think we forgot about all this. We hit a couple random targets – an auto plant, some big polluting factory – they think we've broadened our war. It throws them off guard.”
Oh, yeah, AJ crowed, and then we come back and stick it to them right where it hurts!
“Then we double back and destroy three or four refineries when their guard is down,” Scout said, a grin slipping across her face. “We keep moving, constantly. Never let them guess where we're going next.” She smiled at Francine, who returned it tightly through her pain. “In and out. That way we don't have a repeat of our confrontations in North Dakota and Houston. We stay ahead of them – and we don't lose anyone else.”
“I like not losing anyone else,” Francine said. “Also...would like to keep my limbs in the future.” Wrinkles creased her forehead as she cringed in pain. “This plan is good. I'm with her, Isaac.”
“We could...yeah, we could do something like that,” Isaac said, but he sounded...off. He nodded, though. “I'll, uh...I'll look for an auto plant. Maybe in Arkansas or Alabama or even Georgia. Something not too far away. Then...yeah, maybe a high polluting factory, then...back on target. I'll figure out something.” He pointed to Francine. “You, though...if we stay here for you to heal, are you going to be able to keep quiet?”
Francine looked at her shoulder, then reached down and ripped her shirt sleeve off, turning it into a partial tank top and revealing a plain, bare arm. Her tattoo sleeves had disappeared, the metahuman healing having pushed the ink out of her body in a matter of days. Perfect pale skin waited there, exposed, and a little bloody from a dried-up wound.
Scout inched closer to her. “What happened there?” She pointed at the scabbed-over cut.
“When Nealon...had me iced over...” Francine grabbed a stick off the ground and wrapped the shirt sleeve around it, “...I filled the control console behind me with enough voltage to explode. Caught a few pieces.” She leaned forward, and Scout saw holes in the back of her T-shirt with more scabbing. “Didn't hurt too bad, fortunately.”
“Need me to do anything for you?” Scout asked, leaning over.
Francine looked up at her. “Not right now. Maybe later.” She looked sideways at Isaac. “We should...at some point we should talk about...” She seemed to lose her nerve. “Never mind.”
Scout just frowned. “Okay. Well, you rest.” She patted Francine delicately on the shoulder.
“That goes for you, too,” Isaac said. He was seated cross-legged on the floor of the wooded area, like a modern man thrust back through time or something. He did not look up from his phone, though. “Also, we should wear masks from now on. We've been playing Russian roulette with surveillance cameras.” Now he looked up. “This'll slow them in tracking us.”
“Are they going to be able to figure out anything from AJ's body?”
Scout asked.
“Fingerprints, maybe,” Isaac said, looking back at his phone. “None of us are in his 'known associates' file – assuming he's been arrested.”
No, AJ said. I've never even been arrested. You haven't done time, have you, Scout?
“No,” she whispered, hoping Isaac wouldn't hear her. If he did, he ignored it.
“Get some sleep,” Isaac said, glancing up. “I'll find us targets and take care of Francine.”
“I'll take care of myself,” Francine mumbled. Scout looked over at her; she'd wrapped that stick in her t-shirt sleeve and now it was in her mouth like a bit, her teeth wrapped around it. “Get some rest.”
“Okay,” Scout said, and wandered away. The forest floor was dark already from the clouds overhead. She didn't want to get too far from the others, but...
Go there, AJ said. See? Where those low hanging branches are?
Scout meandered that way. Fresh greenery filled her nose, and she sat down beneath the low branches, back against a rough tree trunk. She could feel the ridges through her hair, and through her shirt. Adjusting herself a few times, she wondered if she'd ever get comfortable.
“I don't think I can sleep like this, AJ,” she whispered.
You'll get there, babes. You're tired enough. Just chill. Close your eyes. It'll happen.
“I don't know,” she said, but she did close her eyes, and soon enough, she was out.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Sienna
“I am, as the Brits would say, 'bloody knackered,'” I said as we rolled along in the back of a Texas DPS SUV. They were putting us up in a local hotel right next to the hospital where Scott and Reed were staying. They had local cops on duty watching our people, and they were going to station a couple officers with us, too, outside our rooms in case our bad guys decided to make things personal.
“Hey, I took a picture of you before everything went crazy,” Jamal said, waving his hand at me – and my hair. “Augustus told me about your social media plans. Want me to send it to you?”
Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39) Page 21